Wed 18 Aug 2010
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: LENORE GLEN OFFORD – The Smiling Tiger.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Crime Fiction IV , Reviews[5] Comments
William F. Deeck
LENORE GLEN OFFORD – The Smiling Tiger. Duell Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1949. Hardcover reprint: Unicorn Mystery Book Club, December 1949. Paperback: Harlequin #159, Canada, 1952.
Although Todd McKinnon, who writes fictional short stories based on true cases, is having a writing slump, he is not interested in the tale presented to him by Hugh Hartlein. According to Hartlein, someone in Beyond-Truth, a cult opposed to any marriage that will produce children since the world is shortly to end, is bumping off its members who disobey that tenet.
Since some of the bumpees are Hildegarde Latham, Harriet Withers, and Grace Vane, McKinnon naturally is not duped.
Still he does take an interest in the leader of the cult. When Hartlein either commits suicide or is murdered by means of an inhaler containing crystalline cyanide, McKinnon gets somewhat involved. Later, after his wife, Georgine, is threatened, he takes the whole matter very seriously.
Another fine novel by Offord.
Bio-Bibliographic Data: Besides being a mystery writer, although not a prolific one, Lenore Glen Offord (1905-1991) was, I have discovered online, the long time mystery critic for the San Francisco Chronicle (1950-1982). She and the newspaper received the Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for best criticism in 1952.
Mike Grost has a lengthy commentary of several of her books on his Classic Mystery and Detection website. (He has placed her in the Mary Roberts Rinehart school of mystery fiction.)
Crime Novels: [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin]
# Murder on Russian Hill (n.) Macrae-Smith 1938 [Bill Hastings; Coco Hastings; San Francisco, CA]
# The 9 Dark Hours (n.) Duell 1941 [San Francisco, CA]
# Clues to Burn (n.) Duell 1942 [Bill Hastings; Coco Hastings; Idaho]
# Skeleton Key (n.) Duell 1943 [Todd McKinnon; San Francisco, CA]
# The Glass Mask (n.) Duell 1944 [Todd McKinnon; California]
# My True Love Lies (n.) Duell 1947 [San Francisco, CA]
# The Smiling Tiger (n.) Duell 1949 [Todd McKinnon; California]
# Walking Shadow (n.) Simon 1959 [Todd McKinnon; Oregon; Theatre]
August 18th, 2010 at 7:53 pm
While Offord does belong in the HIBK school founded by Rinehart, she is much more subtle about it as Mike points out in his piece on her.
She wrote at a fairly high level, and with admirable consistency, and was an admirable critic as well.
August 18th, 2010 at 8:42 pm
Offord contributed to the California MWA “round-robin” novel The Marble Forest by “Theo Durrant”, which was the basis of the film Macabre. Among the other 11 writers were Anthony Boucher, Darwin L. Teilhet, and Dana Lyons. I suspect that Boucher chose the pen name; Durrant(in real life) was a famous San Francisco serial killer. This tallies with Boucher’s fondness for using the names of serial killers as pseudonyms (H. H. Holmes and Herman Mudgett — actually names used by the same serial killer).
Extracts from Offord’s reviews were often used in the book review column (What was its name? Detective Directory perhaps?) in EQMM in the early 50’s.
August 18th, 2010 at 9:34 pm
What I’d like to see is some of Offord’s reviews collected and published, though I imagine the market is awfully small for a venture like that.
If extracts from her reviews appeared in EQMM, it would be interesting to go back and read those at least.
But if any of the full reviews are online, they haven’t shown up in any of the Google searches I’ve done this afternoon.
August 19th, 2010 at 7:07 am
EQMM used to publish one-sentence quotes from reviewers, including Offord, of new books. These quotes sure are tantalizing, and often quite interesting. This was way back circa 1950 or so.
I’ve never seen any full reviews from Offord, except brief ones that sometimes show up in THE BOUCHER CHRONICLES, the giant omnibus of Anthony Boucher reviews collected by Francis M. Nevins. That book is a gold mine.
As a teenager, one of my favorite detective novels was Offord’s WALKING SHADOW, a mystery set at a Shakespeare festival. Just stumbled across this book at a grocery store, bought it… Popular literature was much more high brow in that era, one suspects.
December 18th, 2014 at 12:07 pm
I’m here, because Felony and Mayhem Press have announced that they’ve discovered Lenore Glen Offord, so naturally I’m googling to find out if she’s the kind of writer I like. I like Golden Age mysteries and I like Mary Roberts Rinehart, so I’m hopeful.