Fri 5 Jun 2015
A 1001 Midnights Review: RAE FOLEY – Death and Mr. Potter.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[7] Comments
by Kathleen L. Maio
RAE FOLEY – Death and Mr. Potter. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1955. Also published as: The Peacock Is a Bird of Prey. Dell, paperback, 1976. Thorndike Press, hardcover, large print, 1985.
Rae Foley is, in mystery terms, a graduate of the Mary Roberts Rinehart and had-I-but-known school of writing. She is known as one of the leading lights of “romantic suspense,” yet in her early days Foley wrote mysteries that approximated the classic puzzler. Death and Mr. Potter is one of those efforts. It is the first in a series of books featuring mild-mannered Mr. Hiram Potter as amateur sleuth.
Potter is Old Money. But that money had always been in the firm grasp of his autocratic mother. As the book opens, the matriarch’s funeral is concluding and the long-cowed and obedient son finds himself unexpectedly independent — both emotionally and financially. If that isn’t excitement enough, a young woman plunges from a neighboring high-rise into Potter’s garden. Hiram investigates out of a sense of moral outrage — and the suspicion that one of the mourners at his mother’s funeral must he the murderer.
The story resembles standard murder-at-the-manor fare, except this time the manor is in Gramercy Park and not an English village. The characters are generally stock figures, from the blackmailing poor relations to the ethnic servants who (as Italians) are fat, drink too much wine, and smell of garlic.
Still, there is a certain charm to Hiram Potter and his sincere, if largely ineffectual, sleuthing. The nine Potter mysteries represent Foley’s best mystery work. Although inferior in quality, Foley is better remembered for the more than twenty damsel-in-distress thrillers she produced in the Sixties and Seventies. In these, feminine but fluff-headed young women prove even more ineffectual at detecting than Hiram Potter. They are usually thoroughly bruised and battered by the time they stumble across the murderer, and into the arms of a dominant male suitor, at book’s end.
Hiram Potter also appears in Back Door to Death (1963), Call It Accident (1965), and A Calculated Risk (1970).
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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.
June 5th, 2015 at 4:46 pm
This is a difficult book to to track down, should you be so inclined. There are no copies of the Dodd Mead edition for sale anywhere on the Internet. The paperback is also scarce. Copies are offered for $28 and up, which is about the same as for the British hardcover from T. V. Boardman. Someone is asking $999 for a copy of the Thorndike reprint, but I don’t believe he actually has a copy. I suspect that if you were to buy it, he will going looking himself.
But I found one ex-library copy of the Thorndike book on eBay for $9.99. I will gladly accept $999 for it myself, once I have it and have read it.
June 5th, 2015 at 4:51 pm
In her review, Kathi said their were nine Mr Potter mysteries, and listed three of them at the end. She was in error on this point; there were eleven in all. From Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:
Death and Mr. Potter (n.) Dodd 1955 [New York City, NY]
The Last Gamble (n.) Dodd 1956 [Connecticut]
Run for Your Life (n.) Dodd 1957 [Connecticut]
Where Is Mary Bostwick? (n.) Dodd 1958 [New York City, NY]
Dangerous to Me (n.) Dodd 1959 [Connecticut]
It’s Murder, Mr. Potter (n.) Dodd 1961 [New York City, NY]
Repent at Leisure (n.) Dodd 1962 [Connecticut]
Back Door to Death (n.) Dodd 1963 [New England]
Fatal Lady (n.) Dodd 1964 [New York City, NY]
Call It Accident (n.) Dodd 1965 [Las Vegas, NV]
A Calculated Risk (n.) Dodd 1970 [New York City, NY]
June 5th, 2015 at 7:45 pm
Thank you for an interesting review!
Have never read Rae Foley.
But just sent away for this book from Interlibrary Loan.
June 5th, 2015 at 10:03 pm
I think I read one Potter mystery and got through it, but without a lot of recall. It just wasn’t anything that caught my attention.
June 5th, 2015 at 11:53 pm
Even some of the Potter mysteries were repackaged as Gothics when they came out in paperback, or perhaps the more dignified term “Romantic Suspense” applies.
I think Kathi nails it when she says of Foley’s later books “… Foley is better remembered for the more than twenty damsel-in-distress thrillers she produced in the Sixties and Seventies. In these, feminine but fluff-headed young women prove even more ineffectual at detecting than Hiram Potter.”
Feminine but fluff-headed. Perfect!
April 7th, 2019 at 8:24 am
Elinore Denniston gets a bad rap here. I’ve read Dangerous to Me and it resembles nothing like the HIBK School. There’s a major scene where the town turns into a raging lynch mob ready for vigilante justice when they believe a recently released prisoner is responsible for the mugging death of one of their own. She is more in line with Dorothy Salisbury Davis and Charlotte Armstrong in terms of content and approach to crime fiction though less literary in style than either. Denniston began her fiction career in the 1940s writing private eye novels under the pseudonym Dennis Allen, unfortunately never mentioned in the 1001 Midnights entry. Very different from her Foley books. Prior to Hiram Potter and writing as Foley she created lawyer sleuth John Harland. Traditional detective novels lacking in the social commentary found in the Hiram Potter books or her more action oriented “woman in peril” suspense novels. I have several posts planned on Denniston’s mystery novels. Her life as assistant to pioneering theatrical producer Theresa Helburn and researcher/co-writer of Eleanor Roosevelt’s memoirs is more fascinating than her own books.
April 7th, 2019 at 2:03 pm
Rae Foley needs a lot more coverage than she’s ever gotten, that’s for sure. Glad you’re doing several posts on her books, John. I’m looking forward to them!