Wed 4 Jan 2012
REX HARDINGE – The Case of the Frightened Girl. Sexton Blake Library #247. Paperback original. [Amalgamated Press, UK, 3rd series, September 1951.]
The basic premise of this short novel, 64 pages of small type in a double-column format, was promising – in fact, more than promising, if “impossible crimes†are meat if not potatoes in your regular diet of detective fiction reading.
The girl in the title is Moira Leonard, a girl with a fabulous singing voice, but with a overbearing Svengali of a manager and singing instructor. After her public vocal debut, she cracks under the strain she’s been under and flees the music hall. Max Rosen follows her, argues with her, and ends up dead, stabbed in the back, with plenty of witnesses to say there she was the only one near their final (and fatal) confrontation.
But when the body is examined there is no murder weapon to be found. The girl must have done it and taken the knife with her. Sexton Blake does not believe she did the deed, however, nor does his young assistant Tinker, especially the latter, even though she has disappeared, and into literal thin air.
This takes us through the first eight or nine pages. We also learn that Ron Pearce, a would-be lover of Moira – they grew up together in the same orphanage – would have also had a motive, but the absence of the weapon clears him.
So as I say, a promising premise, but once we learn that Pearce is the one responsible for kidnapping Moira, there is little more I need to tell you about the story.
Rather than a detective story – until the end when the “how†is revealed – this is a thriller novel, and not a very good one. There is too much padding, too much recapitulation of the plot, and too much chase and too little suspense to give me little reason to recommend this to you, unless you’re curious about knowing what a Sexton Blake novel was like in the early 1950s. Or at least what this one was like, as I was.
And oh, as for the “impossible crime†aspect? Totally mundane and not very believable at that. [See Comment #1 for more!]
January 4th, 2012 at 1:46 pm
Here’s the solution to the crime:
** PLOT ALERT **
Ron Pearce had not only made himself a knife-throwing expert over the years, but an excellent fly-cast fisherman too.
Not only that, but the dead man stood in exactly the right spot for the knife to be thrown into his back and then retrieved without anyone seeing what happened.
January 4th, 2012 at 3:44 pm
Pity you struck a poor one here, Steve. Rex Hardinge wrote some good Sexton Blake stories in his heyday. The characters, their orphanage background, and so on, remind me somewhat of the serials that used to run in the British weeklies for women of those bygone times. Rex Hardinge mentioned to me in a letter some years later (1964) that he was still writing the occasional romance for “Dundee”. By this I imagine he was referring to the story papers like Secrets and Red Star Weekly that were printed and published in that city of “jam, jute and journalism” by D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd. Perhaps the melodrama influence was spilling over into this Frightened Girl story! (I believe jpgs of some of the letters RH sent me can still be viewed at Mark Hodder’s site, http://www.sextonblake.co.uk .)
January 4th, 2012 at 5:37 pm
According to Hubin, and if I’ve counted correctly, Rex Hardinge wrote some 77 Sexton Blake novels over a period of 30 years, beginning in 1929. I’ve not read enough Blake’s to know how typical this one may or may not be, but reading my comments again, I think I gave it a fairly accurate (and fair) assessment — from my point of view, of course!
Comparing FRIGHTENED GIRL to the vast majority of the pulp magazine fiction being published in the US around the same time, it stands up well enough, even though it most definitely doesn’t stand out. (I hope that makes sense!)
Whether the story line was overly melodramatic or not, I did read it all the way through to the end. And unless you know my reading habits recently, that counts for more than you may think!
January 4th, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Interesting last paragraph there, Steve. It tends to confirm my suspicions about the influences at work on RH during the post-war decade. Sounds like the Sexton Blake book was a page-turner you couldn’t abandon. Today, as far as I know, nothing much is left in the UK of that once vast scene they called “light fiction”. But the aforementioned D. C. Thomson do still publish a two-a-month series of Pocket Novel romances. Their editor said in a recent interview: “Above all, because Pocket Novels are a quick read, designed to be consumed in a couple of hours, they should be shameless page-turners.” And the male interviewer (and series contributor) added: “Her [the editor’s] reasoning is if you’re swept up in the emotional drama you won’t notice that the situation may be improbable. Whereas, ‘When something stops me liking the characters, then it makes me notice the plot and other details, and that’s when stories can get rejected.’†That was the same formula to which Hardinge was possibly working here all those decades ago.
January 4th, 2012 at 10:48 pm
You’ve read more into my words than I realized I was saying, Chap, and more than that, you’re absolutely right.
Plotwise, the story wasn’t all that great, and there wasn’t anything more than basic cookie-cutter outlines to define the characters, but the action never stopped, and I had to keep reading to see what happened next — even though I knew exactly what it would be.
I tell you what, though. If this had been a 400 page doorstop of a book, I’d have gotten 10 or 20 pages into it, put it down, and never picked it up again.
Shifting gears here for a moment, I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but this is the first book I’ve reviewed since September or so, not including the reprints from the “archives.”
Most attempts at reading current mysteries, and even some older ones, have ended just as I’ve said above. False starts a plenty!
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to do more reading in 2012. Which means finishing a book as well as starting one!
Like most people, most of the resolutions like this that I’ve ever made have been broken in a day or so. Let’s see how I do with this one…
May 2nd, 2013 at 3:07 pm
HI there,
I must say it is really weird reading your comments when they are about my late Grandfather. You may want to know that his Father was Lord Hardinge and that Rex worked for the secret service during the war…He was a writer but his life truly was a mystery that as his granddaughter didn’t find out about until later in his life. Thank you for reading his books, of which I own and few and still try to buy them up when I can, he was one of the most softest, sweetest men I have ever had the pleaser to know and I was honored to call him Granddad.