THE BACKWARD REVIEWER
William F. Deeck


FREDERIC F. VAN DE WATER Hidden Ways

  FREDERIC F. VAN DE WATER – Hidden Ways. Bobbs Merrill, hardcover, 1935. Dell #67, mapback edition, no date stated [1944].

   A rich spinster of uncertain age, Miss Agatha Paget has hired Everett Ferriter, genealogist, to work on an. unexpurgated history of her family. When an apartment in the building in which she lives becomes vacant, she recommends that Ferriter move in.

   One afternoon a man who has been stabbed to death is found in Ferriter’s apartment, a man who had not been seen entering the building. If it was not someone on the premises, the murderer had also not been seen entering the building or leaving it.

   In addition to the police investigation, David Mallory, hall man at the apartment house and former reporter looking for a job on a newspaper, takes it upon himself, and does a poor job, to solve the murder. He has fallen in love at first sight with Miss Agatha’s niece, and anyone who can fall in love at first sight is non compos for the duration, as far as I’m concerned.

FREDERIC F. VAN DE WATER Hidden Ways

   While Miss Agatha knows whodunit immediately, she has no particular interest in seeing the murderer unmasked. Or she doesn’t until the police begin suspecting her feckless nephew.

   What raises this book beyond the average mystery novel is the presence of Miss Agatha. She had had “infantile paralysis” — for young readers, this is what poliomyelitis, if indeed that is a word still recognized, used to be called — at age twelve and has been confined to a wheelchair since then.

   Fortunately, her intelligence and her sense of humor have not been affected by the paralysis of her legs. For example, her views on opera, pace Marv Lachman: “I grew tired long ago of hearing nonsense sung in one language by folks who speak another, to people who don’t understand either.”

— From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 1989.


Editorial Comments:   The reference to long-time mystery fan Marv Lachman refers to the latter’s equally long love of the opera. The two fields of interests have overlapped several times, resulting in a number of articles about (and checklists of) fictional murders with operatic settings.

   Frederic F. Van de Water (1890-1968) has eight entries in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, including one story collection. He had one series character, John Tarleton, who appeared in two of them, neither of which was Hidden Ways.