Wed 25 Feb 2009
Archived Review: G. D. H. & MARGARET COLE – Knife in the Dark.
Posted by Steve under Characters , Reviews[4] Comments
G. D. H. & MARGARET COLE – Knife in the Dark.
Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover; Dec 1941. The Macmillan Co., US, hardcover, 1942 (shown).
More than usual, there are a couple of remarkable aspects to this wartime mystery. The first is the identity of the primary sleuth, and it is definitely not private detective James Warrender, as I carelessly (and rather chauvinistically) assumed when I picked the book up to read. Unh-uh. Not at all. It’s Mrs. Elizabeth Warrender instead. His mother.
Belatedly checking with Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, I found that this was the only full length novel in which Mrs. Warrender was in. Altogether the Coles wrote more than thirty mysteries, and the detective in most of them was Scotland Yard’s Superintendent Wilson. While James Warrender’s mother appeared in an earlier collection of novelettes and short stories called Mrs. Warrender’s Profession, 1939, this was the only novel.
Someone else will have to tell me, because I can’t come up with any — what other private eye character ever found himself upstaged in a detective story by his mother?
The other aspect that I found remarkable — and so, therefore, I’m obliged to remark on it, aren’t I? — was the identity of the murder victim. Up until her death, I thought she had the most vibrant, most interesting personality of anyone else in the book, and it was difficult to see her go.
Not that she was without faults. Check the date of the novel again. As the wife of a dull academic in a university town, the woman was well known for her intolerance and for speaking out against the aliens being resettled in the city — refugees from a Europe suffering from a war we here in which the United States had not yet become involved. The lady was also a bright flame in the town’s small community of scholars, drawing unattached students to her like the proverbial moths, not to mention the occasional faculty member.
She, in fact, is at one point described in a word I doubt that Agatha Christie ever used, a nymphomaniac. (Erle Stanley Gardner might have called this book The Case of the Unscrupulous Siren.)
The murder takes place at a public dance for which she was the hostess, and there are many suspects, many opportunities, a coincidence or two, and — it’s just the kind of mystery the Golden Age of Detective Stories is known for, even if the details of the plot aren’t quite as sharp as they should be. (Fuzzy around the fringes, you might say.)
Mrs. Warrender, approaching 70 in this book, is perhaps of a little higher class standing than the aforementioned Mrs Christie’s Miss Marple, but she has the right instincts, and I humbly apologize to her for wondering why on earth the private eye’s mother is tagging along with him.
[UPDATE] 02-25-09. Quite remarkably, when I fished this review of out of the “archives,” the only two things that I remembered about the book were the two things that I wrote about it in my commentary. Either I was spot on in writing it up the first time, or in the process of writing it up, it reinforced in my mind the two aspects of it that I would find again remarkable at a later date; that is to say, now.
February 26th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Steve,
I very much enjoyed one of the novellas from Mrs. Warrender’s Profession. This was “The Toys of Death”. It was reprinted in one of Marcia Muller’s anthologies.
Keep meaning to track down the Mrs. Warrender books. Your review has added encouragement!
March 1st, 2009 at 9:59 pm
While I never read any of the Mrs. Warrender stories I did read several of the Supt. Wilson ones, and eventually had to grant the chief criticism of the Coles put forward by Haycraft and others, that the Coles put together a fair puzzle but they were awfully dull. I’ll check out some of the Warrender tales and see if that still holds. Someone once said of Daniel DeFoe that he “employed dullness brilliantly” but that’s hardly a virtue in a detective story.
The Coles were hardly alone in the category of being dull reads. I enjoy many of Freeman Willis Crofts books and those of John Rhode, but though both could get some action going, both could be pretty dull too. There’s a certain charm the first time you encounter one of Crofts timetables, but it grows thin fairly soon, and some of the later Dr.Priestly books could be used to cure insomnia. One of the problems with the classical tec tale is it sometimes got so involved with the puzzle and the rules it forgot the rule about entertaining. The absurd length that was taken to was in the Dennis Wheatley books that presented you with characters, motive, even clues like cigarette butts, but you had to play the detective. Alas they pointed out the problem that murder wasn’t much fun without a good detective and things like a plot and real story. They might be fun for a party game but they weren’t much to curl up before the fire with.
One of the reasons we still read Christie, Marsh, Sayers, and Allingham when so many others have gone the way of the dodo is that they weren’t afraid of a little melodrama, adventure, intrigue, romance, and action. Philip Macdonald was often criticized at the time for introducing too much suspense and action into his Anthony Gethryn novels, but as a result many of them are better reads today than clever puzzlers like Anthony Berkley’s Poisoned Chocolates Case where everyone talks and talks and nothing much happens. Towards the end of the classical era even S.S. Van Dine felt the need for Philo Vance to get involved in a car chase and running gun fight (The Kidnap Murder Case). I never understood why dullness was supposed to be a literary virtue in the detective novel.
That said, R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke stories and novels contain few thrills, but the structure of the plot, the joys of watching Thorndyke’s careful and methodical investigation, and the reconstruction of the crime by Thorndyke at the end hold the reader as well as any shocker or thriller. But then Freeman was in Chandler’s words, “the best dull writer,” and Thorndyke a character who, while largely forgotten today, deserves to sit very near the top with Holmes, Father Brown, Poirot, and Maigret. In the right hands even dullness can be a virtue, though not one to be imitated by would be writers.
March 4th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
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