Tue 6 Jul 2010
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: JOSIAH E. GREENE – Madmen Die Alone.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[12] Comments
by Bill Pronzini:
JOSIAH E. GREENE – Madmen Die Alone. Wm Morrow & Co., hardcover, 1938.
Joseph Parisi, a homicidal inmate at the Exeter Hospital insane asylum, turns up missing one night. Circumstances are such that it is unlikely he managed to escape on his own; and it appears the only person who could have freed him is brilliant research psychiatrist Dr. Hubert Sylvester.
But then Sylvester is found on the premises, brutally stabbed to death. Captain Louis Prescott of the local police is called in to investigate, and finds himself confronted with a maze of conflicting relationships among the hospital’s employees, not to mention attitudes and behavior that make him wonder if perhaps some of the keepers aren’t just as insane as their charges.
A second murder, of a shady Italian restaurant owner named Luigi Toscarello, intensifies the hunt for Parisi; it also implicates Parisi’s family, thereby opening up a whole new can of worms for Prescott to sift through. Did Parisi kill both Sylvester and Toscarello? Did someone else kill both of them? Or are there two murderers, one at the asylum and one outside it, each with different motives?
Despite some first-novel flaws — viewpoint lapses, too many exclamation points — and a bunch of ethnic stereotypes, Madmen Die Alone is a solid novel of detection, with a well-depicted background, interesting insights into psychiatry circa 1938, and a neatly clued solution. Fans of fair-play deductive puzzles should enjoy it.
Greene published one other mystery — The Laughing Loon (1939), set in the Minnesota lake country — before abandoning the genre to write mainstream novels.
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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.
July 6th, 2010 at 11:58 pm
This sounds a little like Shutter Island!
July 7th, 2010 at 5:40 am
It does.
I never heard of this one but I like the title.
July 7th, 2010 at 11:14 am
More than the title, which is good, but this is better: “Fans of fair-play deductive puzzles should enjoy it.”
I found a copy online for $8.50 in Fine condition (no jacket), and it’s on its way to me.
— Steve
July 7th, 2010 at 4:27 pm
The author has an interesting background, Born 1911 in Duluth, he could be considered a regional mystery novelist before he went on to write straight novels (like Arkansan Anita Boutell, whom I wrote about a few months ago, he published only two mystery novels). I don’t know whether he published anything else before the US entered World War 2, but he was serving in the military in 1945, when he won a literary prize for soldiers for his straight novel “Not in Our Stars.” This book actually got quite a lot of praise. He died only ten years later, at the age of 44, but I assume he produced more novels in his last decade. His widow later became secretary of the Minnesota Historical Society, apparently.
Bill writes that the book has lots of ethnic stereotypes. This is Minnesota lake country in the 1930s–were there any other ethnicities there besides Scandinavian?
July 8th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Curt: The ethnic stereotypes in MADMEN are primarily of Italian extraction. The broken English-speaking, garlic-smelling, organ-grinding, vegetable-selling type so damn prevalent in pre WWII popular fiction. And these are the good Italians. The “wop” gangsters fare a whole lot worse.
July 8th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Bill, where were these Italians encountered in the book? Does all the book take place in Minnesota? I didn’t realize there were many Italians in the state in the 1930s, so that’s interesting to learn. But, yeah, obviously “Luigi Toscarello” ain’t Norwegian!
On the first Anita Blackmon book (I see I typed Anita Boutell–that was yet another writer!), which tales place in a Little Rock, Arkansas hotel, she has some black servants, but it’s not too bad, as that sort of thing went in the 1930s. They’re not being use for Stepin Fetchit type humor, thankfully!
Would you say the three most prevalent offensive ethnic stereotypes in Golden Age American mystery were:
1. Irish maid–superstitious, easily frightened, emotional, heavy dialect (see Mary Rinehart and Carolyn Wells)
2. Black servant (male or female)–see above (see virtually any American mystery set in the South in the 1930s, it seems to me)
3. Italian waiter/grocer/gangster–emotional, quick to violence, carries stiletto, pungent-smelling
I don’t know how common the Chinese were compared to above in American mystery. I have encountered them more in British books, but I’m not a pulps expert like many of you guys.
Footner’s Sinfully Rich, I should have mentioned in my review, had a Japanese “houseboy” (actually a man) who is referred to by everyone as a Jap, yet he is sympathetically portrayed (Footner even takes time to condemn American prejudice against Japanese Americans, which was nice to see).
The whole garlic thing is kind of funny. In traditional “American” cooking (i. e., English) there is such a fear of the bulb! Even in the 1950s Rupert Croft-Cooke is warning in one of his cooking guides against the peril of using too much garlic. And this was a sophisticated Englishmen who had lived much abroad in sunny, exotic climes. I use tons of the stuff myself, I must be an Italian “peasant” at heart (in spite of being half-English, half-German).
July 8th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Oh, I should mention that, like Steve, I ordered a copy of this book; so this review has made at least two book sales!
July 8th, 2010 at 8:11 pm
Curt: I just looked through the novel again. It isn’t set in Minnesota, or at least not a recognizable Minnesota, but in the mythical city of Zenith in an unnamed state. As for the Italian racial stereotyping, it isn’t as bad as I remembered it being, not nearly as egregious as in some novels of its era, although all of the villains are Italian and the ones who aren’t are generally treated with thinly veiled contempt by the Anglo-Saxon hero and his minions.
As for the most prevalent racial stereotypes of the period between the two World Wars, I’d have to say the Chinese were at the top of the list. All those godawful Yellow Peril novels, the dreadful Pidgin English, the widely disseminated nonsense about opium dens and other underground lairs in the Chinatowns of San Francisco, New York, and other cities.
Blacks were probably the second most offensively treated minority; if I never encounter another cringingly bad piece of Stepin Fetchit/Butterfly McQueen dialect it’ll be too soon. Third place would have to be a tie between Italians and Mexicans.
I, too, eat a lot of garlic; so do a whole lot of other people, a major reason why Italian cooking is the most popular in the world. But I don’t speak in broken English, own a monkey or an organ, or belong to the Mafia. One of my cousins was a minor-league bootlegger and my grandfather made and sold wine and grappa during Prohibition, though, so I guess maybe I’ve got some gangster blood in me.
July 8th, 2010 at 9:58 pm
Zenith, I see! Maybe that’s kinda-sorta Chicago. I wonder whether Laughing Loon is set in Minnesota, that does sound more lake district.
I haven’t read enough of the pulps, I suppose. My American mystery reading tends be more confined to the more genteel, British-aping school. There the ethnic stereotypes one tends to encounter tend to be servants, Irish- or African-American, depending on the the region of the country. Or maybe Italian racketeers.
I did read all the Dashiell Hammett stories and recall one–Creeping Siamese, was it?–where he seems to be somewhat satirically treating the whole Yellow Peril tradition.
I do see the fiend Chinaman a lot in the Edgar Wallace type British thriller (“Take your hands off her, Fu Ee, you yellow devil!!”), though the worse depictions seem to be in books other than those by Edgar Wallace. Wallace has a book called The Tomb of Ts’in, however, which seems to be fantastically rare and House of Stratus never reprinted, and sounds interesting.
Of course in the British novels it’s the Jews who really seem to get it, especially in the 1920s. British mystery has such a bad reputation in this regard, it was something I felt I needed to address with the authors I wrote about.
Yes, the treatment of African-Americans in American mysteries tends to be quite regrettable. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m hesitant to buy a mystery from that period set in the South, because I figure it will go out of its way to be insulting, in the name of “humor.” For the same reason I don’t like the Chan films that introduce Stepin Fetchit type characters (including in one Stepin Fetchit himself). Ethnic whites playing Chan has never bothered me (of course I’m not Asian-American), but the way black are portrayed makes ME roll my eyes. It’s an unfortunate convention entertainment media got into, that’s for sure.
July 8th, 2010 at 10:55 pm
Just thinking, Zenith was the Midwestern city in Babbitt, and was variously suggested to be Cincinnati, Duluth, Kansas City, Milwaukee or Minneapolis. Wonder if this is the same Zenith, or that other Zenith?
July 9th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
Those guys got the copies I was about to buy! Darn. I’ll keep hunting…
Great review, Bill. It’s interesting how perceptions and memory shift with time.
July 9th, 2010 at 1:46 pm
Three copies on Abebooks, for $10, $25 and $125 (last with jacket).