JESSICA FLETCHER & DONALD BAIN – Murder She Wrote: A Palette for Murder.

Signet, paperback original. First printing, October 1996.

   The first question that occurs to me as I sit down to write this review, and it hadn’t occurred to me before now, except in a nebulous sort of way, is just how many of these “Jessica Fletcher” books are there? They’ve seemed sort of generic and ubiquitous at the same time, and I never stopped to get them listed and enumerated. Until now. Take a look at the other end of this review…

   … and now that your eyes are back,some historical perspective may be in order. The TV show itself, the one starring Angela Lansbury, was on the air for twelve seasons, from 1984 to 1996, with four made-for-TV movies appearing after that, the last one in 2003.

   The first Murder, She Wrote novel came out in 1985, and there’s at least one that’s scheduled for 2009, a span of years that’s even longer than when the TV program was on the air. It’s quite a track record, and it certainly goes a long way in explaining the ubiquitousness I mentioned above.

   Which of course got me to thinking. What other series of TV tie-ins has consisted of more books than this one with Mrs. Fletcher has?

   To set some parameters, let’s restrict this question to detective novels. Otherwise in the field of science fiction, there is Star Trek, and we do not want to even begin to go there.

   In the field of gothics, and books that are actually included in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, there are the Dark Shadows books, of which there 32 (at a quick, rough count). Good, but not good enough. There are 35 Murder, She Wrote books, or there will be soon.

   If anyone can come up with a series I’m simply not thinking of — and, no, I don’t consider the Perry Mason paperbacks with photos of Raymond Burr on the back cover true TV tie-ins, or should I? — let me know.

   As for the author, Donald Bain, he has his own website (and photo), and by following the link, you can find a complete list of all of the books he admits that he has written, and not all of them have been crime fiction, by any means. His bibliography also pointedly omits 24 books he wrote under another’s name but which he can not contractually reveal. Most of these books are (in all likelihood) the Margaret Truman books, of which Al Hubin says, again in the Revised Crime Fiction IV:

   Back up when I starting this review, which seems a long time ago already — you don’t know it, but it is now several days later, real time — I also called the books “generic” as well as ubiquitous, and perhaps I should apologize for that, even though I said “they’ve seemed,” since of course and/or as usual, this is the first one that I’ve read.

    “Ubiquitous” I think I may have proven, but the case is far less solid when it comes to generic, unless of course you think that the TV show was generic, and maybe it was, but what TV show today exerts as much effort into actual deduction in terms of its detective work than Murder, She Wrote? Numb3rs, perhaps? Any others?

   I’ll get back to this. To tell you something about the book I have just read, in it Jessica Fletcher is visiting the Hamptons (on Long Island), trying to get away from the hustle and bustle of the big city and secretly to try her hand at oil painting.

   The latter effort fails — well, in fact both objectives fail — if getting away from the big city means staying away from murder cases — when the young model posing nude for Jessica’s class is found dead while taking a short break. (With careful camera angles, most of the activity immediately preceding could have been shown on television.)

   But in any case it is thus that Mrs. Fletcher is introduced to world of modern art, including thefts (her own sketch of the dead girl included), forgeries and high finance, Long Island style.

   She also tells the story in her own words, and what is quite remarkable is that Donald Bain as the author has her voice down cold. Perfect. To a T. From page 58:

   And then a second death occurs, suggesting that the first one was not a simple accident of some kind, as if we (the reader) did not know that already. Perhaps innate in the world of “cozy” detective novels, the death may have affected me more than it did anyone in the story, including Mrs. Fletcher, who had begun to know the second victim well. (Shouldn’t she have at least been angry about it?)

   What I said about Donald Bain’s having his “co-author’s” voice down pat, he — at this relatively early point in the series — it does not seem to me that he has the mystery-telling (and solving) pattern of television series very well in mind at all.

   Instead of calling the suspects together and recreating the crime scene (in flashbacks) and naming the killer as a result, we have Jessica going here and there on her own and in exceedingly dangerous places, not realizing as she should that a two-time killer is on the loose.

   The ending is rather muddled altogether, in fact, and that I ending up skimming through it, rather than being transfixed with the unraveling, may tell you more about the mystery than anything else, I regret to say. I may read another, but without a push from some other direction, all things considered, it’s not as likely as it should be.

By JAMES ANDERSON —

   The Murder of Sherlock Holmes (n.) Avon, pb, 1985.

   Hooray for Homicide (n.) Avon, pb, 1985.
   Lovers and Other Killers (n.) Avon, pb, 1986.

By DAVID GEORGE DEUTSCH —

By JESSICA FLETCHER & DONALD BAIN —

   Gin and Daggers. McGraw-Hill, hc, June 1989; Avon, pb, October 1990; Signet, pb, April 2000.

   Manhattans and Murder. Signet, pb, December 1994.
   Brandy and Bullets. Signet, pb, August 1995.
   Martinis and Mayhem. Signet, pb, December 1995.
   Rum and Razors. Signet, pb, April 1995.
   A Deadly Judgment. Signet, pb, April 1996.
   A Palette for Murder. Signet, pb, October 1996.
   The Highland Fling Murders. Signet, pb, April 1997.
   Murder on the QE2. Signet, pb, October 1997.
   Murder in Moscow. Signet, pb, May 1998.
   A Little Yuletide Murder. Signet, pb, October 1998.
   Murder at the Powderhorn Ranch. Signet, pb, May 1999.
   Knock ’Em Dead. Signet, pb, October 1999.
   Trick or Treachery. Signet, pb, October 2000.
   Blood on the Vine. Signet, pb, April 2001.
   Murder in a Minor Key. Signet, pb, October 2001.
   Provence to Die For. Signet, pb, April 2002.
   You Bet Your Life. Signet, pb, October 2002.
   Majoring in Murder. Signet, pb, April 2003.
   Destination Murder. New American Library (NAL), hc, October 2003; Signet, pb, September 2004.

   Dying to Retire By. Signet, pb, April 2004.
   A Vote for Murder. NAL, hc, October 2004; Signet, pb, September 2005.
   The Maine Mutiny. Signet, pb, April 2005.
   Margaritas and Murder. NAL, hc, October 2005; Signet, pb, September 2006.
   A Question of Murder. Signet, pb, April 2006.
   Three Strikes and You’re Dead. NAL, hc, October 2006; Signet, pb, September 2007.
   Coffee, Tea, or Murder. Signet, pb, April 2007.
   Panning For Murder. NAL, September 2007; Signet, pb, September 2008.
   Murder on Parade. NAL, hc, April 2008. Signet, pb, March 2009.
   A Slaying In Savannah. NAL, hc, September 2008. Signet, pb, September 2009.
   Madison Avenue Shoot. NAL, hc, April 2009

[UPDATE] 01-30-09. Any updating has already been done, either in the course of the review, or in the subsequent bibliography. This post is long enough now without my needing to say more!

CAROLYN WELLS – Faulkner’s Folly.

George H. Doran Co., hardcover, 1917. Serialized in All-Story Weekly, September 8 to September 29, 1917.

   Carolyn Wells’ Faulkner’s Folly (1917) is the first novel I have read by that author. It shows the frustrating mix of (artistic) virtue and vice that other commentators have discerned in her work.

   The book is startlingly close to the traditions of the Golden Age novel. But it was written before Christie, Carr, Queen, Van Dine and other intuitionist Golden Age writers had published a line. And this is hardly Wells’ first work; she had been publishing for over a decade, since 1906, when this novel appeared.

   The novel has an apparent medium who holds séances, etc., and whose “supernatural” gifts are ultimately explained naturally; this seems very anticipatory of both John Dickson Carr and Hake Talbot. Carr was in fact devoted to Wells’ works while growing up, and we know from both Ellery Queen and Carr biographer Douglas G. Greene that he was one of Wells’ biggest admirers. Many of Wells’ tales are impossible crime stories; she was apparently one of the first to expand this genre from the short story to the novel, following Gaston Leroux.

   Faulkner’s Folly also anticipates the Golden Age in other ways. It takes place in an upper class country house, and draws on a closed circle of suspects of relatives, guests and employees of the murdered man. There is an atmosphere of culture to the novel, too; the murdered man was a great painter, and one of his guests is the widow of the architect who built his mansion. The whole novel is very close in tone to S.S. Van Dine; in fact it is one of the closest approximations in feel to his work among the mystery authors who preceded him.

   Wells would certainly be classified as an intuitionist. She started by publishing in All Story magazine, one of the early pulp magazines that also featured the work of Mary Roberts Rinehart. But her work could not be more different from Rinehart’s.

   There is no sign of an influence from Anna Katherine Green, or of scientific detection à la Arthur B. Reeve. Nor is there much suspense of any sort in Wells’ work. Instead, Wells’ book is squarely in the intuitionist tradition, and seems on the direct line to such later intuitionist writers of the Golden Age listed above.

   The best part of Wells’ book is the finale, when the murderer is revealed and the various mysteries are explained. It reminded me of the pleasure I have received from the finales of Christie, Carr and other Golden Agers, when all is revealed.

   Now for the down sides of Wells’ work. Her book is nowhere as good as a work of storytelling as the later authors we have mentioned. And her plot is nowhere as clever as these later authors, either. Bill Pronzini’s Gun in Cheek (1982), his affectionate but hilarious history of really bad crime fiction, points out other truly major flaws in Wells’ works.

   Her impossible crime plots tend to depend on secret passageways. This gimmick was later, during the Golden Age, regarded as a cheat; the locked room novels of Carr and others often contain solemn assurances from the author that no secret passageways were found in the buildings where the crimes occurred. To be fair, Wells showed some real ingenuity in the use of such secret panels and doors; but this gimmick is likely to annoy modern readers.

   We can compare Wells’ novel with “Nick Carter, Detective” (1891), an early series detective tale. The story opens with a “locked house” crime. Nick Carter suspects secret passageways, and sure enough he eventually finds the house to be riddled with them.

   They are similar to the secret passageways Herman Landon used for his Gray Wolf stories in Detective Story in 1920. Detective Story was the first specialized mystery pulp magazine. So the impossible crime caused by secret passageways was a common coin of inexpensive mystery fiction.

   Carolyn Wells also used secret passages for her locked room tales in the 1910’s, although she tended to employ Occam’s razor on them. She would employ the minimum number of passages need to commit the crime, often just one. It would be strategically placed in the only spot that would allow the crime to be committed.

   There was a quality of ingenuity to her placement: it was not at all obvious that a secret passage anywhere would enable the crime to be possible; the revelation that a secret passage would make the crime possible would startle the reader at the end of the story. She achieves a genuine puzzle plot effect by this approach: where is the secret passageway, and how could any secret passage possibly enable this crime?

JOHN B. WEST – An Eye for an Eye.

Signet #1642, paperback original; 1st printing, February 1959, plus at least one reprint edition.

   John B. West was a man of many talents and achievements: A doctor, he was both a general practitioner and a specialist in tropical diseases; he was also the owner of a broadcasting company, manufacturing firm, and hotel/restaurant corporation. He lived in Liberia, was black, and late in his life — as a pastime, apparently — wrote novels about white private eye Rocky Steele, of New York City.

   West appears to have been used by Signet Books as an attempt to fill the gap when their star seller, Mickey Spillane, stubbornly refused to write any more novels (until The Deep in 1960, that is). While the Rocky Steele novels were never any real competition for Mike Hammer (or anyone else), the six titles in the series did go through various printings and editions.

   An Eye for an Eye, the first Rocky Steele adventure — in which for no particular reason the private eye avenges the death of the blond, beautiful, and wealthy Norma Carteret — is singled out here arbitrarily, as all of the books seem to be of a similar “quality.” (One book, the posthumously published Death on the Rocks, 1961, does have an African setting to distinguish it.)

   While unquestionably lower-rung Spillane imitations (like Mike Hammer, Rocky Steele smokes Luckies, packs a .45, refuses the advances of his lovely secretary, has a loyal police contact, etc.), the West novels are goofily readable, as Rocky Steele teeters between the violence and revenge of Hammer, and the broads and campiness of Shell Scott.

   The world West creates (actually, re-creates) is pure pulp fantasy, and makes the work of Carroll John Daly read like documentaries. The energetic pulpiness of the plots, and West’s confident, tin-ear, tough-guy dialogue (“Mercy! That rat didn’t know what the word meant, and I wasn’t gonna teach him.”) gives his private-eye stories the same sort of appeal as Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner tales and Michael Avallone’s later Ed Noon novels.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

         Following Steve Mertz’s review of The Deadly Kitten…

   I’ll admit to a great deal of affection for the Carter Brown books that goes beyond my appreciation for Bob McGinnis sexy stylish covers. The Brown books are fast, fun, and harmless time killers that you might use like a bowl of sorbet to cleanse your mental palate after reading a heavier (and better book).

   And it isn’t as if the books are badly written. Al Wheeler is different enough from Danny Boyd, who is different enough from Rick Holman and so on, and the Mavis Seidlitz books deserve to be rediscovered and rightly praised.

   In some sense the Brown books are a continuation of Robert Leslie Bellem and the screwball school of writing, similar to Richard Prather and Shell Scott (though lacking the qualities that set the Scott books in their deservedly higher position of regard), or the Fickling’s Honey West. Anthony Boucher was one of the few critics to go out of his way to praise some of the better Brown books.

   The Brown books always reminded me of a good episode of one of the old Warner’s private eye series like 77 Sunset Strip or Hawaiian Eye, pleasant time killers you could enjoy and forget like a good hamburger.

   Interested readers should note that a few of the author’s other books under other pseudonyms made it in print in the States, including at least one written as Dennis Sinclair.

   Lt. Al Wheeler was popular enough in his native Australia to star in his own comic strip which often featured Carter Brown as a somewhat comic Watson to the L.A. detective.

   I have to admit that I miss the equivalent of these entertaining and inexpensive books today. Sometimes you would rather spend time with Danny Boyd than wade through War and Peace, and the Brown books were always what they were intended for, a pleasant diversion, simple, and in their own way, charming escapism.

SIMON HAWKE – Much Ado About Murder.

Forge, hardcover; First Edition, December 2002; reprint paperback: January 2004.

   There’s a period (1585-1592) in the life of William Shakespeare that’s called the Lost Years, in which nothing is known — where he was, what he was doing, and who he was hanging out with.

    Filling in the gap — pure speculation on Hawke’s part, not to mention audacity — here’s the third in a series of detective adventures of the most famous poet and playwright the world has ever known. Assisting him is his good friend and hanger-on with the Queen’s Men, Symington “Tuck” Smythe.

   Hard times have hit the traveling group of players. Plague has struck London, and all of the city’s playhouses have been closed down. (Not so incidentally, Hawke describes the horrible condition of the unsanitary streets in more than adequate detail. Ghastly.) Will has sold some sonnets, though, so he and Tuck are not starving, yet.

   They also run athwart the Steady Boys, a gang of young ruffians who feel that the country is being done under by too many immigrants: England for Englishmen in Shakespeare’s day!

   But while the events in Will and Tuck’s day-to-day life are interesting, after 130 pages, they’re no longer entirely riveting, so for the mystery fans perched in the front row, when the murder of Master Leonardo occurs, it’s with (dare I say) a certain amount of relief and “at last.” It’s a relatively minor case to be solved, but it’s Will’s sense of what makes people do what they do that saves the day.

   Bawdy at times, extremely funny at others, this is an entirely enjoyable lark, a remarkable flight of fancy, and I think you’ll like it, too.

[UPDATE] 01-26-09. It turns out that Simon Hawke is (or was) an SF writer named Nicholas Yermakov, before he changed his named legally to Hawke.

   He’s most noted, perhaps, for a long series of books in his “TimeWars” series, the first of which you see here to the left. He’s also written Battlestar Galactica, Batman, and Star Trek novels, as well as novelizations of “Friday the Thirteenth” movies.

   There were only four books in his series of Shakespeare movies, I’m sorry to say. Perhaps the funny bones of a wider audience weren’t tickled as much as mine was. The fourth one was never even released in paperback:

     The Shakespeare & Smythe mysteries —

[LATER THE SAME DAY.] I was looking at the two cover images I included in this post, and I think I can see one reason why there were 12 books in the TimeWars series, and only four in Hawke’s Shakespeare series, even though they were desgned for two entirely different audiences.

   You probably can, too. Look at the cover of Much Ado. It’s perfectly designed to show that it has something to do with a mystery (from the title) and something to do with Shakespeare (also from the title). Other than that? Dullsville.

JOHN BUXTON HILTON – Holiday for Murder. Diamond, reprint paperback; 1st printing, July 1991. Originally published as Passion in the Peak. US hardcover edition: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Originally published in the UK by Collins Crime Club, hc, 1985.

   This is another in the author’s Inspector Kenworthy series, the fifth in the series published by Diamond. There have been seventeen in all, and they have all been published in the US, surprisingly enough. (For most British mystery writers, there’s always at least one book that doesn’t make the cut with publishers over here — or so it seems.)

   Of the ones they’re doing, Diamond is not publishing them in order. One that I read not too long ago was Hangman’s Tide, which originally came out in 1975. In Holiday for Murder, which was written ten years later, Inspector Kenworthy has already retired, but his ability as a detective has spread throughout England so greatly that he’s regarded as very nearly omniscient.

   In this book he investigates a strange sort of murder, a hillside automobile accident in the driver disappears, only to show up later, very much dead, some distance away. The dead man is a notorious womanizing rock musician (all of which are (to some degree) very much synonymous) who has the leading role (that of Christ) in a non-denominational/ecumenical Passion play now in the stages of rehearsal in the small village of Peak Low.

   Practical jokes at the expense of two different Mary Magdalene’s have preceded the accident, but the murder was apparently committed for other reasons. The villagers, various policemen, and the many actors, singers, electricians and so on involved in putting on the extravaganza are all precisely and individually depicted — Hilton’ s primary strength as a writer.

   The solution to the murder is presented in very anti-climactic fashion, strangely enough, as if Hilton felt that the mystery itself wasn’t strong enough to stand on its own.

   There is also a red herring — the matter of the match from Doncaster — that is poorly done. Kenworthy seems to know all about before he’s informed, and its significance in the story is none at all. It’s never mentioned again.

   But if you enjoy mysteries with small English village settings, read this one anyway. You’ll like it.

[UPDATE] 01-25-09. Strangely enough, while I don’t remember any of the details of this book’s plot, much less whatever flaws I may have found in it, I do remember enjoying reading it, which makes that last sentence pretty much of a guarantee.

   One thing that I didn’t change in the review is Kenworthy’s rank. I called him an Inspector, but in Al Hubin refers to him as a Superintendent. (See below.) The easiest explanation is, of course, that he was promoted sometime during his career.

   When Hilton wasn’t writing about Kenworthy, he used Inspector Thomas Brunt as his detective on the case. What really distinguished them from the Kenworthy mysteries, though, is that the six Brunt books took place in England in the late 1800s through the year 1911 or so.

   And, for the sake of completeness, Hilton also wrote another six mysteries as by John Greenwood. Inspector Jack Mosley was in all of these. I remember the Mosley books as being somewhat lighter in tone, though I may be in error about that.

   Expanded from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, here’s a list of all the Kenworthy books —

         KENWORTHY, SUPT. SIMON     [John Buxton Hilton, 1921-1986.]

       Death of an Alderman (n.) Cassell, UK, 1968. Walker, US, 1968. Also published as: Dead Man’s Path, Diamond, pb, 1992.
       Death in Midwinter (n.) Cassell, UK, 1969. Walker, US, 1969. (Diamond, pb, 1994.)
       Hangman’s Tide (n.) Macmillan, UK, 1975. St. Martin’s, US, 1975. (Diamond/Charter, pb, 1990.)
       No Birds Sang (n.) Macmillan, UK, 1975. St. Martin’s, US, 1978. Also published as: Target of Suspicion, Diamond, pb, 1994.
       Some Run Crooked (n.) Macmillan, UK, 1978. St. Martin’s, US, 1978.
       The Anathema Stone (n.) Collins, UK, 1980. St. Martin’s, US, 1980. Also published as: Fatal Curtain, Diamond, pb, 1990.

       Playground of Death (n.) Collins, UK, 1981. St. Martin’s, US, 1981. (Diamond/Charter, pb, 1991.)
       Surrender Value (n.) Collins, UK, 1981. St. Martin’s, US, 1981. Also published as: Twice Dead, Diamond, pb, 1992.

       The Green Frontier (n.) Collins, UK. 1982. St. Martin’s, US, 1982. Also published as: Focus on Crime , Diamond, pb, 1993.
       The Sunset Law (n.) Collins, UK, 1982. St. Martin’s, US, 1982.

       The Asking Price (n.) Collins, UK, 1983. St. Martin’s, US, 1983. Also published as: Ransom Game, Diamond, pb, 1992.
       Corridors of Guilt (n.) Collins, UK, 1984. St. Martin’s, US, 1984. (Diamond, pb, 1993.)

       The Hobbema Prospect (n.) Collins, UK, 1984. St. Martin’s, US, 1984. Also published as: Cradle of Crime, Diamond, 1991.
       Passion in the Peak (n.) Collins, UK, 1985. St. Martin’s, US, 1985. Also published as: Holiday for Murder, Diamond, 1991.
       The Innocents at Home (n.) Collins, UK, 1986. St. Martin’s, US, 1987. Also published as: Lesson in Murder, Diamond, 1991.
       Moondrop to Murder (n.) Collins, UK, 1986. St. Martin’s, US, 1986.
       Displaced Person (n.) Collins, UK, 1987. St. Martin’s, US, 1988.

    Older posts on this blog often receive comments containing interesting viewpoints or insights that it’s a shame that they’re buried where regular readers of this blog aren’t likely go back and find them. In particular David Vineyard has been going through the entire backlog of posts, and over the past few days he’s been leaving an impressive array of both opinions and information throughout this blog about what he’s found.

    So over the next week or so, I’m going to be re-posting many of the comments he’s left, hoping to make sure the work he’s done receives the widest audience possible.

    There’ll be no frills on these. No cover images or bibliographies, for example — they’ll have been done in the original posts. You’ll have to go back and read those anyway. Nor will I usually add a reply of my own, but please feel to respond yourself, if you feel so inclined.

    First up, David’s reply to George Kelley’s overview of the Joe Gall series:

    To which Mark Lazenby has already responded:

MABEL SEELEY – The Listening House.

Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, 1938; reprinted, 1953 [25th Anniversary of the Crime Club]. Paperback reprints include: Popular Library #69, 1944; Mercury Mystery 45, digest-sized, n.d.; Pyramid R-1009, 1964, plus several later printings.

   It’s hard to believe that The Listening House, one of the cornerstones in the Haycraft-Queen collection, has been out of print for so long and that it isn’t a book everyone knows.

   Perhaps the problem is that Seeley wrote only a handful of books (nine, not all of them mysteries) and stopped writing when she was still fairly young — she lived until 1991 but her last mystery book appeared in 1954. It might be a regional thing too, for she was resolutely set in her native Minnesota.

   And then again it might be that, for all her other charms, Seeley never again wrote a book as fine as her first, though she copied the title again and again so that she had during her lifetime the sort of brand name loyalty Travis McGee novels had, or in our own day Sue Grafton. Seeley’s other books include The Chuckling Fingers, The Beckoning Door, The Crying Sisters, and The Whistling Shadow.

   In The Listening House a young woman, fired from her job and down at her luck, rents a cheap room from a huge old creepy rooming house that is set on the very edge of a steep overlook, and tenants throw their garbage off the back side of the building.

   Gwynne Dacres is not your ordinary ingenue heroine. She has been married, she’s capable of taking care of herself, for the most part, she has managed to surmount the Depression. The Great Depression is a tactile, living thing in this novel, a character as important as any of the crime victims or killers.

   Gwynne’s new landlady, old Mrs. Garr, is a terrible old tarantula of a woman, out of a Balzac novel, sitting on her cellar steps half the day and night, waiting, waiting, waiting, but for what? In the meantime a man’s body is found (by Gwynne) dumped, like an old load of dry goods, into the trash area at the bottom of that long cliff-like drop.

   Mrs. Garr’s terror is unfeigned, and we are not surprised, but horrified, and maybe even moved to pity, when the ghastly old lady is the second corpse whose body Gwynne discovers.

   There is plenty of horror or terror or what have you in this book, but it is also a fairly clued mystery with roots in a socio-sexual crime that occurred some twenty years back, during the days when police corruption in “Gilling City” allowed vice to run rampant.

   Seeley’s no-nonsense honesty about the harsh realities of what today we call “sex work” distinguishes her book from any other that I know of published in the late 1930s. It has a harsh, biting, Faulknerian edge to it.

   (I was thinking one of the reasons Seeley has faded from view is that none of her books was ever made for the movies — Irving Wallace made The Chuckling Fingers into a 1958 episode of the TV anthology series Climax! — and I can see that The Listening House is far too sexually frank for Hollywood of the late 1930s.)

   In addition to the sex-crime horror, which remains pretty disgusting even in today’s considerably degenerated world of “torture-porn” writing, Gwynne herself is torn, though in an amusing and sophisticated way, between the love of two very different men, a newspaper publisher, and the cop investigating the murders.

   (She accidentally meets the first one while he’s wearing only his boxer shorts, doing chin-ups in his apartment, so she gets a long view of his bare torso and hairy forearms and legs — sort of the “meet cute while naked” introduction Ellery Queen used to give his cute male characters.)

   Some have called Seeley’s plot marred by “coincidence,” but I don’t read it that way. Certainly many of the tenants had reason to kill their evil landlady — but it’s because they followed her there, to track her down, it’s not as if it were all some accident that so many of the characters had some ties to the 1921 disappearance and suicide of the unfortunate Rose Liberry.

   I think Seeley is painting a picture pf a complex society in which crimes against women are endemic because they’re built into the system, they’re the mortar which holds the bricks together in an edifice larger than a listening house.

   Too bad her other books aren’t as good, but she did make up for a disappointing run by a sharp and exciting finale: The Whistling Shadow, which is like the William Irish/George Hopley book that Woolrich never wrote.

      ___

         Bibliographic data:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin; various paperback editions are shown.]

SEELEY, MABEL (Hodnesfield). 1903-1991.

      The Listening House (n.) Doubleday 1938.
      The Crying Sisters (n.) Doubleday 1939.

      The Whispering Cup (n.) Doubleday 1940.

      The Chuckling Fingers (n.) Doubleday 1941.
      Eleven Came Back (n.) Doubleday 1943.

      The Beckoning Door (n.) Doubleday 1950.

      The Whistling Shadow (n.) Doubleday 1954.

   The opening of Isabel Ostrander’s The Clue in the Air (1917) is a full intuitionist detective novel. There is a Dying Message. There is a description of a whole apartment building, and the suspects living on various floors and corners — a description that could have served as a blueprint for the many Golden Age novels which have elaborate floor plans in their stories.

   The detectives also investigate alibis and time tables. Unfortunately, this does not lead to a classic puzzle plot. Ostrander unravels all the threads of her story, but does not show any great ingenuity in the Christie tradition.

   Still, the whole tone of the novel anticipates the storytelling of Christie, Queen and other intuitionists of the Golden Age. Ostrander, like other American women writers such as Lee Thayer and Carolyn Wells, was writing intuitionist detective novels at an early date: in the 1910’s, and long before the famous British writers like Christie and Crofts, who allegedly started the Golden Age in 1920.

   Thayer and Wells dealt with the domestic realm in their tales: a house full of suspects, whose motives sprung from their personal relationships with each other and the deceased. This was in marked contrast to the public realm writers of the American Scientific school, where motives spring from business relationships, theft, politics and civic corruption.

   Ostrander has plenty of domestic motives. But she also has a young inventor and his plane. A typical scientific school, business type issue. Similarly, in At One-Thirty (1915) we have domestic motives for some characters (a tangle of jealousy and adulterous relationships) and business issues motivatingothers (a detailed look at a Wall Street swindle).

   Business issues in Christie et al tend to be somewhat perfunctory. Someone will threaten to kill someone because they are double crossing them in a business deal. The motive is not developed into a major story, the way the American Scientific School would do it.

   For example, everything about the missing cashier and the embezzlement in The Circular Staircase is elaborately plotted. Ostrander straddles both traditions in her books.

   Another difference between the two schools. The intuitionists play attention to the crime scene, and the movements of the suspects around it during the crime. This is not generally true of the American Scientific School. A possible exception: Cohen’s Six Seconds of Darkness.

   This motion around the crime scene probably is a consequence of impossible crimes: one cannot have a Zangwill-Chesterton rearrangement in space and time, without tracking the characters’ movements.

   But it spreads to writers that are not always impossible crime oriented, such as SS Van Dine, Anthony Abbot, and Ellery Queen. It was also found in Doyle, in stories like “The Naval Treaty.” This was before the main impossible crime movement.

   The central mystery plot of Ostrander’s At One-Thirty (1915) is a straightforward imitation of Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913). This shows that Ostrander was reading British mystery novels.

   Ostrander’s book is very similar to Golden Age mystery fiction to come, with murder among a closed circle of suspects in a wealthy home. Here as elsewhere, Ostrander introduces a whole slew of suspects, each with a different subplot.

   Servants tend to be prominent characters in Ostrander, just as they are in Bentley. They do not tend to be the anonymous functionaries of Christie, who fade into the background. Instead they play major roles in the stories.

   Ostrander’s The Tattooed Arm (1921) has her police detective hero Sergeant Miles go undercover into a wealthy Long Island home as a servant, and much of the story is narrated from the servants’ hall and point of view.

   Scientific School writers sometimes paid close attention to issues of spousal abuse. These stories are fully feminist, and remind one of the attention that the women’s movement focused on this issue in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Ostrander also continues this tradition. At One-Thirty has a very detailed look at the problems of an abused wife.

   At One-Thirty centers on blind detective Damon Gaunt. Ostrander does a vivid job of evoking his world of sound, touch and smell. Gaunt makes many brilliant deductions from these senses, in a way that evokes Sherlock Holmes’ numerous deductions about his clients.

   Gaunt’s main detective work centers around flashes of insight into the situations in front of him. Ostrander makes it clear that he solves mysteries by pure thinking. This is definitely in the intuitionist tradition, and recalls both Sherlock Holmes before him, and such Golden Age intuitionist writers to come as Christie, Milne and Queen.

   Bibliographic data:    [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

OSTRANDER, ISABEL (Egenton). 1883-1924. Pseudonyms: Robert Orr Chipperfield, David Fox & Douglas Grant. (Books published under the latter three pen names are not included here.)

      At One-Thirty (n.) Watt 1915
      The Crevice [with William J. Burns] (n.) Watt 1915
      The Heritage of Cain (n.) Watt 1916

      The Clue in the Air (n.) Watt 1917 [Timothy McCarty]
      Island of Intrigue (n.) McBride 1918
      Suspense (n.) McBride 1918
      Ashes to Ashes (n.) McBride 1919
      The Twenty-Six Clues (n.) Watt 1919 [Timothy McCarty]

      How Many Cards? (n.) McBride 1920 [Timothy McCarty]

      The Crimson Blotter (n.) McBride 1921
      McCarty, Incog (n.) McBride 1922 [Timothy McCarty]
      The Tattooed Arm (n.) McBride 1922
      Annihilation (n.) McBride 1924 [Timothy McCarty]
      Dust to Dust (n.) McBride 1924

      Liberation (n.) McBride 1924
      The Black Joker (n.) McBride 1925
      The Neglected Clue (n.) McBride 1925
      The Mathematics of Guilt (n.) McBride 1926

      The Sleeping Cat (n.) McBride 1926
      The Sleeping Cop [with Christopher B. Booth] (n.) Chelsea House 1927

[Editorial Comments.]

   Please see Mike Grost’s website A GUIDE TO CLASSIC MYSTERY AND DETECTION for more essays such as this on the history of Detective Fiction. If it’s your first visit, you’re bound to stay quite a while — and to come back often.

   For further discussion of Carolyn Wells and Mary Roberts Rinehart, among other contemporaneous authors, see the comments that follow Bill Pronzini’s review of Carolyn Wells’ novel, The Wooden Indian.

TODD DOWNING – The Case of the Unconquered Sisters.

Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, 1936. UK edition: Methuen, hc, 1937.

   The skeleton of a professor doing sabbatical research down in Mexico is accidentally brought to light by the derailment of a train carrying a museum’s collection of archaeological relics back across the border.

    Customs official Hugh Rennert is first upon the scene, and this connection to the case, as slight as it is, seems enough to lead the American embassy in Mexico City to request his services in conducting the ensuing murder investigation.

   This is his fifth case, by the way. Customs work apparently means that you’re naturally snoopy — or is it the other way around?

   This is a curious sort of mystery, filled with wild and crazy clues, and populated by a pair of mildly eccentric expatriate ladies and their niece (beautiful), assorted servants and embassy officials, plus the remaining team of university scholars. It’s artificial, scatter-minded, and clouded by clumsy obfuscation.

   Nobody would publish such stuff today, and in a way, it’s a shame.

[UPDATE] 01-18-09. As a matter of fact, the folks who run the Rue Morgue Press are doing well reprinting books like this, and more success to them! In spite of my critical remarks, books like these are fun to read, and that’s a statement you should not take lightly.

   I’ve been omitting the letter grades I added to my reviews back then, but this one received a “C.” Obviously it’s not one of the classics — or you would have heard of it before now — but it’s equally not a stinkeroo from the bottom of the barrel. You can never go far wrong with a Crime Club mystery.

   As for the author, he was born in Oklahoma (Indian Territory) in 1902 of Native American (Choctaw) descent. He was the state’s “first successful writer of detective novels,” according to this website, which has a considerable amount of other information about him.

   All of the books below, in a list taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, take place in either Texas or Mexico — quite often both:

DOWNING, (George) TODD. 1902-1974.

      Murder on Tour (n.) Putnam 1933 [Hugh Rennert]
      The Cat Screams (n.) Doubleday 1934 [Hugh Rennert]
      Murder on the Tropic (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Hugh Rennert]
      Vultures in the Sky (n.) Doubleday 1935 [Hugh Rennert]

      The Case of the Unconquered Sisters (n.) Doubleday 1936 [Hugh Rennert]
      The Last Trumpet (n.) Doubleday 1937 [Hugh Rennert]
      Night Over Mexico (n.) Doubleday 1937 [Hugh Rennert]
      Death Under the Moonflower (n.) Doubleday 1938 [Peter Bounty]
      The Lazy Lawrence Murders (n.) Doubleday 1941 [Peter Bounty]

   I don’t know very much about Downing’s second series character. An online review from Time Magazine of this last book describes him as a Texas sheriff, with the mystery taking place on a train en route to Mexico.