Fri 18 Sep 2009
A Review by Curt Evans: CAROLYN WELLS – The Gold Bag.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[13] Comments
CAROLYN WELLS – The Gold Bag. Lippincott, US/UK, hardcover, 1911. Silent film: Edison, 1913, as The Mystery of West Sedgwick. Online text: here.
The prolific American writer Carolyn Wells was mocked by Bill Pronzini in his entertaining book on “alternative” mystery classics (books so bad they’re good), Gun in Cheek, for having written an instructive tome on the craft of mystery fiction, The Technique of the Mystery Story (1913), and then seemingly failed to follow her good advice when composing her own mystery tales.
Wells’ second detective novel, The Gold Bag — which actually precedes The Technique of the Mystery Story by two years — illustrates Pronzini’s thesis. It might well have been titled The Leavenworth Case for Dummies.
Carolyn Wells was first drawn to reading mystery fiction in her mid-thirties when a neighbor lady came calling on Wells and her mother and read to them some of Anna Katharine Green’s latest detective novel, That Affair Next Door (1897) (Wells, by the way, suffered hearing loss as a child and wore a hearing aid throughout her life.)
Green had published a hugely popular mystery novel, The Leavenworth Case (1878) nearly twenty years earlier, and had settled into a comfortable career as a prolific crime writer.
Though I personally find it unreadable due to the stilted, melodramatic speech-making of its characters (particularly the two nieces), The Leavenworth Case is considered a seminal work of mystery fiction and is still taught today. Moreover, it does have a solid plot and is fascinating for being an early instance of so many Golden Age mystery tropes: the millionaire murdered in his mansion study/library, the retinue of suspicious servants, the beautiful niece (in this case two), the private secretary, the will.
Wells clearly was familiar with The Leavenworth Case, because The Gold Bag, her follow-up to her debut detective novel, The Clue (1909), obviously is modeled on Green’s famous tale.
In The Gold Bag there is a Watsonesque narrator figure, as there is The Leavenworth Case (in this case Burroughs, apparently a private detective — Wells is never clear on realistic detail like this). As in Leavenworth, this figure is called in to be involved in a murder investigation, this one in a wealthy town in New Jersey (probably, one suspects, quite like Wells’ own home town).
The case involves a millionaire murdered in his study, a retinue of suspicious servants, a beautiful niece, a private secretary and a will. (Sound familiar?) As in Leavenworth, a great deal of time is spent on the coroner’s inquest. As in Leavenworth, the Watsonesque figure becomes enamored with the beautiful niece suspected of the crime. Will true love prevail? What do you think?
Following Leavenworth by over thirty years, The Gold Bag is written in a sprightlier style and reads much more quickly. Where it falters is in providing an adequate puzzle. Wells’ putative Great Detective, Fleming Stone, appears briefly at the beginning of a 325 page novel, then returns in the last twenty pages to solve this case.
If this suggests to you problems with the solution, you are right. Most of the novel is devoted to Burroughs’ investigating various trails (including the trail of the gold bag of the title), all leading to different suspects, and all proving false. During virtually the whole novel, Burroughs, when not pining for the niece, is lamenting how the great Fleming Stone is not around to solve the case for him, until you just want to thrash him.
When Stone does show up he eliminates one suspect on the basis of deductions he had made some days ago about some shoes left out to be cleaned at a hotel, shoes that just happen to turn out to have been the shoes of this suspect!
“It is very astonishing that you should make those deductions from those shoes, and then come out here and meet the owner of those shoes,” pronounces another character. I’ll say!
Then Stone pulls the murderer, the only person left not suspected at some point in the novel, out of his hat, and the fool hysterically confesses his/her guilt and commits suicide with one of those convenient poison pellets Golden Age murderers always seem to have handy when the Great Detective points the Dread Accusing Finger at them.
This leaves one page for the author to pair off Young Love, and all ends happily ever after (except for the murderer, but readers will barely remember him even one page after his exit).
So, with disappointing detection, no clever murder mechanics, cardboard characters and no interesting descriptive writing, there is not much to recommend this one, except from a sociological standpoint.
It’s not really bad enough, either, to qualify as one of Pronzini’s alternative classics. Notably lacking here is the rather silly humor and situations found in many of Wells’ later detective novels.
There is still an air of unreality about the whole enterprise, however. The murdered man was a businessman of some sort, but we never learn anything about his business. A police investigator is briefly mentioned, but he does nothing. Indeed, it seems to be the view in the The Gold Bag that coroners and district attorneys rely exclusively on private investigators to conduct murder cases for them, without any involvement from the police.
One is left with the impression that Wells had a rather limited acquaintance with what might be termed “real life.” Granted, Golden Age novels often did not stress realism, but Wells’ novels seem to me too far removed from any semblance of it.
If they were clever Michael Innes-ian parodies of the form that would be one thing, but they don’t seem to be that either. So far they just seem to me mildly silly.
But, given their apparent popularity, they do show that there was a mystery fiction audience in the United States over the period Wells published mystery novels (1909-1942) that must have been far, far removed in taste from the celebrated hardboiled style.
Note: Curt hasreviewed another book by Carolyn Wells on this blog, Feathers Left Around, from 1923.
September 18th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Curt, I admire your devotion to get through Wells. Generally I have no trouble reading early mystery fiction from this period, but I just can’t find enough entertainment in Wells work to push through. I know she was once highly popular, but she’s almost unreadable for me.
Sounds as if this is yet another Fleming Stone outing to give a pass to.
September 18th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
David, yeah, I haven’t found anything I could recommend yet, except, like I said, from a historical standpoint. I do find it kind of interesting that she was able, evidently, to make a tidy income for decades from books like this, and primarily in the United States. (She doesn’t seem to have had much success in England.)
Feathers Left Around was actually better as a puzzle, though it was no great shakes and was written in rather an annoyingly frivolous manner, which I think became more pronounced in her work as she went on. (The characters in Murder at the Casino, one of her last ones, are almost surreal in their behavior — Carolyn Wells’ background in 1890s nonsense humor certainly is evident.)
The Gold Bag is not really humorous, but at the same time it’s completely superficial. I guess it was adequate for much of the time, but the ending is a total fizzle, if you care about detection. Having your great detective appear in the last twenty pages of the book and essentially intuit the solution out of thin air is not exactly an inspiring finish.
As far as the comparison to Anna Katharine Green goes, I’m reading The Circular Study and quite enjoying so far. Written twenty-two years after The Leavenworth Case, it is less stilted and more to the point and it shows much greater skill in puzzle construction than anything I have seen in Wells. You actually want to know the solution.
The Gold Bag reminded me a bit of Fletcher’s The Middle Temple Murder, though the latter is better written. They both have investigation before dropping the solution into the laps of readers right at the end. This makes both books “mystery” essentially, rather than true detective novels, because there’s not a clued resolution for detective and readers to ratiocinate. By Golden Age puzzle standard they are very mild beer.
September 18th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Green is one of the writers from that era (and a bit earlier) that I do find highly readable both historically and for entertainment value. Haven’t read The Circular Study, but will have to look it up.
I think in Wells part of the problem is something you bring up, which is her books aren’t really detective stories despite having many of the trappings. She seems more interested in the general idea of mystery, but only as a sort of framework for rather tame social comedy — which lacks the bite that it would really need in order to work.
And if you are going to bypass the detective element you almost have to at least substitute thrills, chills, suspense, and or atmosphere for the more intellectual thrills, but Wells doesn’t bother. Fleming Stone lifts the solution out of thin air, leaving the reader turning back desperately through the pages to see what they missed.
I’m reminded that someone once said of Philo Vance that some of his solutions were only fair play if you happened to be an expert in German criminology, opera, and the properties of heavy water, but at least if you were an expert in those things you had half a chance of beating Vance to the solution. In the case of Fleming Stone mind reading seems the readers only hope other than lucky guesses.
You almost get the feeling she was trying to split the difference between writers like Green and the extravagant kind of book Stevenson and Lang were doing (New Arabian Nights, The Disentanglers …), but lacks the sense of real romance and humor that those writers did so skillfully. Reading Wells is about like trying to enjoy a drawing room comedy from the era by an indifferent playwright.
Some of today’s cozy’s remind me a bit of Wells in that sense that mystery is just a sort of vague background for social comedy, but most are much more readable. I know Wells was an accomplished writer, and as you point out (and Pronzini and Haycraft too) she wrote an insightful book on writing mystery that is worth reading even today. Curious that she seemed incapable of following her own advice.
September 18th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
Just a quick thought.
This is the kind of book that E.C. Bentley was sending up when he wrote Trent’s Last Case, though I doubt he ever read or even heard of Wells and Fleming Stone.
Ironically Bentley, who was doing his savage best to take a scalpel to the detective novel as it was practiced at the time, ended up giving birth to the best writers and the finest period of the Golden Age.
Just goes to prove results and intentions don’t always match up.
September 19th, 2009 at 1:45 am
As I recall, Wells commented quite favorably on Trent’s Last Case in the second edition of The Technique of the Mystery Story (1929). The first edition, from 1913, is online, but not, I think, the second edition, which has around 100 additional pages. And she thought Agatha Christie and her Poirot were brilliant.
I’m sure John Dickson Carr’s Grandest Game essay is referring to Wells, along with Rinehart (Green too?), as the waltzing ladies. His childhood memories of Wells were so strong, as I recall reading, that he bought her collected works in the forties and had them shipped, with great difficulty, to Britain. Of course, I imagine he was a teenager when he was reading them. Wells actually is well-known as a girls story writer (the Patty series I think it is), and I wonder whether young people weren’t part of the mystery readership as well. Some of the Wells’ books seem about on par with the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Though I would have thought they would have seemed hopelessly old-fashioned by the thirties.
I’ll read a few more by her, at least. They are easy enough reads, if not entrancing ones. I’ll say one thing, Lippincott, I believe it was–her thirties publisher–did her proud, the books themselves are beauties.
Curt
September 19th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
I can’t really rank Wells with Rinehart and Green in terms of readability. I don’t think Wells ever did a book as good as Rinehart’s The Man in Lower Ten or Green’s Leavenworth Case. If she did I missed it.
As for Carr, I understand his love of the books of his youth. He was a great fan of Hanshew and Cleek as well as Reeve and Craig Kennedy too. I’ve just never been able to warm to Fleming Stone. I did enjoy one or two of Lee Thayer’s Peter Clancy books, but then she at least tried to incorporate a touch of Wodehouse and Jeeves and Wooster into her best books.
I suspect many of Wells teen readers did grow into mystery readers, and I understand she filled a niche of readers who certainly appreciated her comfortable and predictable books. While I’ve never been able to warm to them or really enjoy them I can see where she gave her readership what they wanted.
And I’ll admit that I can enjoy both Hanshew and Reeve and even old Nick Carter Nickel Library adventures. I’m not attacking Wells or her fans, but it is a little surprising they stayed as loyal to her for as long as they did, long past the time when she or her books had any relevance.
As Haycraft said of her she really didn’t improve any, if anything her worst traits just became more prominent. But then she isn’t alone. John Rhode kept going with Dr. Priestly well into the 60’s and hadn’t done anything really worth reading since the 40’s. Mystery fans are nothing if not loyal.
September 19th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Yes, I think Anna Katherine Green had a tougher mind and much more ingenuity than Wells, from what I have read. She was also a better writer, when she got out of the ultra-melodramatic idiom. I’ve never been a big fan of Rinehart’s HIBK style, though I’d certainly agree that she too is easily better than Wells. I started The Red Lamp and this is the best thing by Rinehart I have read. I like the narration here much more.
By the way, Wells uses flower petals left at the scene of a crime as a clue and has a visit by the detective to a florist. This same thing occurs in The Circular Study eleven years earlier.
The Gold Bag reminds me a lot of Carr’s description of the hackneyed mystery novel c. 1920, in the The Grandest Game in the World.
September 19th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
I think you hit the word there — hackneyed. Not hack work, but just tired and with no surprises or attempts to do anything more with the genre. There is a generic quality to Wells and Fleming Stone, as if she had chosen to stake out a middle ground where nothing ever challenges the reader or jolts him, but just sails smoothly along.
I’d like to read some criticism of Wells works from women writers since I suspect her largest fan base was female. There are writers whose chief appeal is to one sex or the other, and I wonder if Wells tendency to exploit young love and tame social comedy might have been a big appeal to her female following.
September 20th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
I think the way the discussion of Wells’ mystery fiction is going is onto something. Her mysteries were meant for women, not for men — the equivalent of early cozies (which everyone thinks Christie’s works were, but I strongly disagree).
That means that rigorous detective procedure could be ignored (and was), along with almost all of her other faults that have been pointed out now, very capably and several times over.
And also, as David suggests, her emphasis on “young love and tame social comedy” was a plus as far as her reading audience was concerned, not a minus.
September 20th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
In some ways the famous rules established by the Detection Club and by Van Dine were as much a reaction to the kind of thing done by Wells as against Rohmer and Wallace. Quite a few writers worked along the lines of Wells books, the mystery element and detective business not really the point of the books, but just a sort of general background to add a bit of atmosphere for a typical romance or social comedy.
That probably dates them badly and removes us from appreciating them, but then there are numerous best selling authors from Wells era and a bit earlier (and later) that no one reads today but who everyone read then. Who today reads Winston Churchill (the American novelist, not the British statesman), Robert Chambers (other than his horror and sf), Elinor Glyn, E.M. Hull, Robert Hichens, C.N. and A.M. Williamson, Hugh Walpole, or any of dozens of once bestselling writers of the era?
Popularity is no gauge of literary immortality — ask Robert E. Howard or H.P. Lovecraft. For that matter when is the last time most of us read James Gould Cozzens, William Bradford Hugie, or Hamilton Basso, major bestselling writers when some us were young?
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