Tue 1 Mar 2016
HELEN REILLY – Not Me, Inspector. Random House, hardcover, 1959. Ace Double G-531, paperback, 1963 (packaged with the author’s The Canvas Dagger). Macfadden-Bartell, paperback, 1971.
Puzzle plots were beginning to make their way out in the late 50s, as far as mystery fiction was concerned, but the authors who’d been writing them since the 30s and 40s were still holding on. Helen Reilly is an author who fits the bill. By 1959, she’d been writing mysteries since 1930 (The Thirty-First Bullfinch, a standalone novel), with this one the 25th of 28 Inspector McKee mysteries.
Not Me is not a sudden throwback to a period some 15 or 20 years earlier, but rather a continuation of good but not outstanding detective novels by Reilly. The not-so-good news is that while the intricately worked out puzzle works to perfection — it really does — there is a huge problem with the telling of it, and I’ll talk about that shortly.
It’s not entirely because Inspector McKee has such a small role to play in it, but in a way, it is, because that leaves the characters themselves, innocents and suspects alike, to carry the load, and for a long portion of the book, they don’t.
To specifics: Mercedes “Dace” Allert’s somewhat weak and definitely bad-tempered husband Harvey disappears soon after it is discovered that he cashed a forged check written on his stepmother’s account. When she dies a lingering death after an automobile accident in a car that Harvey worked on shortly she left the city for upstate New York, he is only spotted here and there, apparently afraid to come home to face the questions that he will be asked and avoiding the consequences. The only thing keeping Dace going is that he does not know that his stepmother died and will not be pressing charges. Not only that, but he has inherited all of her money.
Reilly was usually very good at pacing her novels, but even the best of authors would find some difficulty in keeping the reader’s attention focused on Dace’s tortured mind, thinking this about her missing husband, then that. In the meantime, though, as a small bonus, we also get a picture of upper middle class society as it was in Manhattan in the 50s, or least one version of it.
The reason that Inspector McKee is seldom seen in this novel is that there is no obvious homicide victim whose murder needs to be solved, not until page 121 of a 176 page paperback, and that of a woman in Danbury, Connecticut, who has no possible connection to Harvey Allert, other than that a man who called himself Harold Allen had just checked in there, and it was from his room from the dead woman was pushed.
It seems well nigh impossible for Reilly to tie everything up as neatly as she does, but she does, and no, McKee never has a lot to do with everything but to explain it all up at the end. It’s an ending worth waiting for, and I don’t think the story could have been told any other way, but if there had been, I’d say that this one could have been a contender.
March 1st, 2016 at 8:51 pm
This is a good review.
It makes interesting points about the plot architecture of the novel.
Helen Reilly is an important author in the history of detective fiction.
Her literary quality is extraordinarily high, especial her powers of description and atmosphere.
Unfortunately she doesn’t fit well into most categories. She isn’t hard-boiled or tough; she doesn’t write comedies-of-manners set in English country houses; she isn’t Freudian or interested in abnormal psychology.
Her skepticism about money and material goods runs counter to the gross materialism of much modern society.
March 1st, 2016 at 11:26 pm
Reilly was usually reliable, and her portraits of upper and middle class New York pretty good. I can’t say I was ever much of a fan though, I like McKee, but there never seemed much to hang a hat on there, and unlike a lot of fictional characters who appear in as many books as he does I have no feeling I would know him if I saw him. To be honest I never felt I really knew him from book to book. For me, and I may be alone in this, he might as well have been a different character in each book.
I know some female fans seem to have found him attractive, but I always felt they were endowing him with attributes from their imagination and not Reilly’s.
My usual process with Reilly was that I would read one and like it, read another and not like it as much, miss several and then maybe pick up another and perhaps like it. I’ve never been able to quite put my finger on why I have this antipathy toward her work either.
There are lesser writers I like much more than her, and others at about her level I feel more enthusiasm for.
Still, I agree with Mike about her import. It would be interesting for someone who is more familiar with her than I am to write about her work as a whole. I was always afraid maybe I just missed the right books, though I read CANVAS DAGGER, which seemed to be her best known if not best.
March 2nd, 2016 at 1:53 am
David, you say “… unlike a lot of fictional characters who appear in as many books as he does I have no feeling I would know him if I saw him. To be honest I never felt I really knew him from book to book. For me, and I may be alone in this, he might as well have been a different character in each book.”
I think you’ve put you finger on something. I’ve not read all that many McKee books either, but it is my impression that in many of them, his appearance comes late, and often seems almost incidental.
To take this book as an example, McKee is actively involved on only 33 of 176 pages in the Macfadden edition, and 12 of those are at the end when he comes in and essentially gives a wrap-up report.
That’s not a lot of time to get any kind of impression of who he is or how he thinks.
March 2nd, 2016 at 7:24 am
There is an 80 page (32,000 words) study of Reilly on my web site:
http://mikegrost.com/reilly.htm
It still needs expansion, and doesn’t yet cover all of her books.
It includes a list of Recommended best books.
A look at Scientific Detection in Reilly
And a section on “Who Is McKee?”.
March 2nd, 2016 at 11:22 am
The primary characters in NOT ME are fleshed out and are very well done. You have to be interested, however, in 1950s Manhattan upper middle class society, though, to be interested in their problems. McKee, on the other hand, is pretty much a non-entity, there only to establish a police presence to keep the mystery aspect alive. Otherwise the conflict is only between the members of a close-knit group of related people and friends.
The only description of McKee is that he is a Scotsman, tall, with an intelligent face.
March 2nd, 2016 at 5:36 pm
I need to take a deeper look at characterization in Reilly – and other writers. And take a deeper look at McKee as a person.
I spend more time on mystery plotting, landscape, atmosphere, social depictions – and don’t tend to pick up on characterization.
The points raised above are good ones.
McKee’s police assistant Todhunter is my favorite series character in the Reilly books.
March 2nd, 2016 at 5:46 pm
My mental picture of McKee, until I read that description I quoted in #5, was that he was short, bantam-sized, choleric, and chewing on a cigar.
I have no idea where that came from!
March 2nd, 2016 at 9:52 pm
Inspector McKee is a gentlemanly workaholic.
He’s always “launching a major investigation”.
One that will Fully Utilize the Resources of the New York City Police Department.
During WWII he was a commander in US Naval Intelligence.
March 3rd, 2016 at 3:20 pm
McKee’s type dates back to Dupin, the almost asexual individual interested only in the puzzle at hand. In that way he is not that different from the amateur sleuths like Philo Vance and Ellery Queen who held themselves above the common human fray (Ellery, it is implied in the early books married later on, and in the later books he is a bit more attracted to women).
I don’t recall McKee as ever being portrayed as mysoginistic, but other than that he fits the usual line of sleuths from the period he first appeared in.
Mike, in his excellent article on Reilly, suggests McKee may have been Gay, but I think that is a far too modern interpretation of a type of perpetual bachelor on Sherlock Holmes or Henry Higgins lines that was common in the detective literature, and literature in general at the time. I’ve heard the same interpretation of the relationship between Leo Vincy and Horace Holly in SHE, and I don’t think Haggard meant to imply any such thing. What seems to us flowery expressions of manly love and emotions were fairly common in the period and no one thought anything of them.
There may well have been some homosexual element to those strong bonds between men portrayed in the literature of the time, but few of the authors intended that or would have imagined their readers feeling that way.
There is a tendency to take modern notions and apply them to fictional characters from the past without taking into account their creators or their interests. In Reilly’s case I don’t know enough about her to form an opinion based on that, but it doesn’t take much knowledge of Conan Doyle to see that Doyle would not have created a Gay hero or that E. W. Hornung was only showing what was then fairly common expressions of old school fealty between Raffle and Bunny no matter how much actual bisexual behavior occurred in the real Old School world.
McKee falls into a group that would include Holmes, Vance, Queen, even Doc Savage, of lifetime bachelors who I suspect their creators would be shocked to hear suspected of being Gay. The fact Reilly never discusses McKee in relation to women could as easily mean she was attracted to him herself and keeping him for herself rather than writing herself into the precedings as his girlfriend, or equally that she was simply not interested in him other than in his role as a sleuth.
I think we are always in danger of showing more of our own modern prejudices and opinions when we do these interpretations of fictional characters from the past. Under our light Homer’s Odysseus is a dangerous sociopath, but we know in the culture of the time his more troublesome aspects expressed things the people then admired.
I have no problem with using these interpretations to find new aspects of the characters in drama, but I think reading the original text that way is a shaky proposition for critics. Sometimes, in Freudian terms, its just a cigar.
This isn’t to suggest Mike is wrong. As I said, his article is excellent as usual. I just found the speculations on McKee’s sexual orientation too modern an interpretation of what was then a staple of detective fiction and fiction in general, the non sexual bachelor.
March 3rd, 2016 at 7:50 pm
David makes some good points.
I am far from sure exactly what is going on in Reilly.
My article uses terms like “might be”, “it is possible that”, and so on.
It is meant to explore possibilities in Reilly.
Not stake out lines in the sand, or definitive judgements.
By the way, my article makes almost no biographical claims about Reilly.
I am a critic, not a biographer.
Almost nothing I say about Reilly, or other mystery authors, is in any way based of their alleged biographies, personal lives, letters, etc.
My articles are critical analyses of published fiction – exclusively.
March 3rd, 2016 at 11:37 pm
One thing all writers have a hard time accepting is how much of a role the reader plays in the work. The reader tends to transfer their own beliefs and views to the story.
What a character looks like depends as much on the reader as the writer.