Tue 1 Feb 2011
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: LEE THAYER – Out, Brief Candle!
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Authors , Reviews[36] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
LEE THAYER – Out, Brief Candle! Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1948. No paperback edition.
The life of Emma Redington Lee Thayer is more fascinating than any of her novels. Born in 1874, she quickly established herself as a painter of murals on the walls of private homes, and some of her work in this field was displayed in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair. Later she specialized in doing the designs for stamped bookbindings, and countless early-twentieth-century titles were made visually more appealing thanks to her skill.
It was only after World War I that she started writing books herself, turning out a total of sixty mystery novels, for all but the last three of which she also designed the dust jackets. Apparently she holds the record for both professional and personal longevity in the mystery field, for her last book, Dusty Death (1966), came out when she was ninety-two, and she lived to be ninety-nine.
She seems to have been a nice, refined, well-to-do old lady. Unfortunately she wrote her novels for an audience she thought of as exactly like herself, with no attempt to widen her appeal.
Fifty-nine of Thayer’s sixty books deal with redheaded gentleman detective Peter Clancy, a dinosaur among sleuths if ever there was one. Imagine a stick figure from Edwardian times adrift in the decades of depression, war, angst, and civil rights, and trying desperately to pretend that nothing has happened, and you have something of the flavor of a Peter Clancy exploit.
Thayer’s novels move with the speed of an arthritic snail trying to cross a piece of flypaper. Her plotting is abysmal, her style unbearable, her characters impossible. In most of his adventures, Clancy is attended by an ever-deferential valet named Wiggar, a Jeeves clone without a drop of humor, who is constantly getting off bons mots like “Oh, Mr. Peter, sir!”
Her favorite device for bringing a book to climax was to have God Almighty himself strike down the killer from on high, while Mother Nature whipped up a furious storm and the rhetoric swirled and squalled. Those who might think this description is exaggerated are referred to Accessory after the Fact (1943) and Still No Answer (1958), as well as to our main entry.
Out, Brief Candle! takes its title from Macbeth and its kickoff situation from Agatha Christie: Like Poirot in Death in the Air (1935), Clancy investigates a murder aboard an airliner on which he was a passenger.
Like all Thayer novels, this one is twice as long as necessary; but a slightly ingenious solution, combined with a truly grisly encounter between a little girl and a body in a coffin, lifts it to the ranks of Thayer’s best, whatever that means.
Lee Thayer is a highly specialized taste, but if for no other reasons than her industry and longevity, she deserves better than to be totally forgotten.
———
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.
Editorial Comment: Complementing this review, or to be more precise, the impetus for my posting it here, is one covering Lee Thayer’s first book, The Mystery of the 13th Floor (1919), by J. F. Norris on his blog. You should go read it.
February 1st, 2011 at 11:37 pm
I have to agree that ‘Thayer’s best’ is damning with faint praise. When I first started checking mysteries out of the library there were quite a few Thayers from the thirties and forties, and since one of them described Peter Clancy as a private detective I tried them out. I think I read three before it dawned on me they weren’t getting any better.
I don’t know if Thayer and Clancy are worse than Carolyn Wells and Fleming Stone — my overall opinion was she wasn’t quite as good, which is a terrible thing to say about anyone.
Still, she must have had loyal fans to last that long despite her short comings. I’ve long held that many mystery fans don’t care about the puzzle or the writing as much as the comfort factor and the company of familiar friends, and it the only thing I can think of that explains the longevity of writers like Wells and Thayer.
Still 1919 to 1966 is a heck of a run for anyone.
February 1st, 2011 at 11:38 pm
This review strikes me as perhaps unduly harsh as an assessment of Thayer’s whole writing career (she was very prolific and perhaps had better days than others). I’ve hardly looked at enough Thayer to set myself up as an expert on her work (far from it), but it seems to me that for people who have an interest in classical Golden Age mystery, the type loaded with material detail, she might be worth a look (if you like Crofts or Rhode and a tolerance for slower pace, for example, you might giver her a shot and see what you think).
John on his blog is right, her earlier work, from the 1920s, does read like Carolyn Wells, but I think she got better than that.
Wiggar seems obviously meant to be a Bunter knock-off–not so surprising, given the popularity of Sayers. Some of her work was well-reviewed in the 1930s.
To call the work of a writer “abysmal…unbearable…impossible” and then to conclude that “she deserves better than to be totally forgotten”–well, I don’t know! Thayer might have preferred to have been totally forgotten that to have inspired that damning catalog of dismissive adjectives!
February 1st, 2011 at 11:44 pm
David, glad to see you back!
So you think she worse than Carolyn Wells? That’s more damning even than anything Nevins wrote in this old entry!
All this makes me feel like I need to read her some again and see for myself (she was published by Dodd, Mead for some time). Personally, I don’t mind a slow pace, as long as there is a decent plot. I didn’t have the impression that Thayer was totally incompetent in this area (I’ve only read one Wells that actually had a good plot).
Nevins does comment about the one book that it has a “slightly ingenious” solution (how is one “slightly” ingenious, by the way?)!
February 1st, 2011 at 11:52 pm
Curt
From what I’ve read Thayer wasn’t so much bad as totally uninspired, a greater collection of cliches, stereotypes, and mundane events than a Thayer novel would be hard to imagine. If anyone ever constructed generic mysteries by the numbers it was her, and I’ve read books from most of the decades she wrote in, and she never got any better.
It isn’t that she is cozy or the pace was slow so much as she was totally predictable — which is not a virtue in a writer as unimaginative as Thayer.
Wells at least wrote an excellent book about writing mysteries, and on a few occassions almost rose above her worst efforts, but I’ve never read a Thayer that wasn’t just dull, but also flat. In that they aren’t even good enough to sink to (or rise to) the level of alternative classics.
I’d compare them to unleavened bread, but unleavened bread can at least satisfy your hunger.
Peter Clancy may hold a record though, because out of 59 books I’m pretty sure the only characteristic anyone could claim for him is that he has red hair and a butler.
February 2nd, 2011 at 12:29 am
I actually enjoyed most of the book I read. I was just 1. shocked that Clancy was 15 and hardly appeared at all and 2. frustrated that she decided to fill out the book with nonsensical “character development” like the scene where Philip Gregory was dreaming about his boyhood friend as he picnicked beneath a bridge that used to be their “pirate’s cave.” But then, of course, he manages to overhear the two villains and suddenly we’re back in the main action.
As a first novel it really surprised me. She was a dust jacket artist prior to that, for heavens sake! She must’ve read a heck of a lot of crime fiction in the magazines she worked for. She sure got down much of the formula. But it was just that – formula and so much of it, and overabundance in this case. Still to attempt an impossible crime for your first book – gutsy! The only other practitioners I can think of that subgenre at the time were G.K. Chesterton and Ernest Bramah. Better company could not be had.
February 2nd, 2011 at 2:11 am
John, your review of Thayer is the best thing on her I have read (Mike Grost has some interesting writing on her too). Your willingness to challenge received wisdom certainly appeals to me. I’ll have to look at some of her better-reviewed thirties books that I have. Her books aren’t so easy to find these days–abysmal, unbearable and impossible as they may be!
Carolyn Wells (I feel something of an authority on her now) was never very good, but she just got plain silly in much of her later work, so that her mysteries read like Arthur Conan Doyle filtered through Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll. Some of them are indeed alternative classics (In the alternative sense they became oddly addictive to me–I think I’ve reviewed about four or five of her books here now, with my review of The Master Murderer not yet uploaded; only one of them was actually, as opposed to alternatively, good).
February 2nd, 2011 at 2:23 am
With Clancy being 15 and an impossible crime involved Thayer may have been imitating another impossible crime writer of the period, Gaston Leroux, and his teen sleuth Rouletabille.
My impression of her work was always of how bland it was and to some extent generic. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler talking about R. Austin Freeman, she did not employ dullness as a virtue in that Peter Clancy has virtually no interior life and the mysteries happen to people you have no feeling for.
For historians of the genre she is worth a look, and considering how popular she once was she might even have a few readers today, but in general I think she is justly forgotten.
I will point out though that she was not incompetent at what she did — she just wasn’t interested in most of the things we think of as making a good mystery novel. As the article points out she wrote for an audience very like herself, and obviously pleased them, but even on the rare occassion, as indicated here, when she managed to pull off something worthy she went on too long and failed to follow through.
Her books always felt to me as if they had all the substance of cotton candy without the flavor or the pretty colors. They weren’t bad enough to be fun and they weren’t good enough to consistently reward the effort. Flavorless is the best way I can describe Peter Clancy and her books.
February 2nd, 2011 at 3:58 am
After having found one actually good Carolyn Wells (The Furthest Fury), I try never to say never with mystery authors (I also have a high tolerance for what most people consider dullness today).
Well, except maybe with Sydney Horler, but his books are just stupid and obnoxious (his nonfictional writings, however, offer a fascinating, forcefully presented self-portrait of a remarkably repellent personality)! Of course these are thrillers, which tend not to be my favorite in any case, but I don’t even find Horler much fun in the alternative sense (though Bill Pronzini writing about him is fun).
February 2nd, 2011 at 6:27 am
Curt
I used to be less judgemental, but as I grow older I have less tolerance for books that don’t really reward the effort it takes to read them and for writers like Thayer who aren’t bad enough to read for fun or good enough to read for pleasure.
As I said, in general I found more to admire in some of Carolyn Wells books than any of the Thayer’s I read. On the other hand I grant that out of more than sixty books she might have written something half way decent I missed — I’m just not sure that it is worth the effort of anyone save for a dedicated genre historian like you or Mike Grost to wade through enough of her work to find it. If you find one I hope you review it and let the rest of us know. It would be reassuring to know she got it right at least once.
I don’t mind dull books if they are well written or have other rewards like intriguing plots, characters, or even a well realised setting. But none of the Thayer’s I read had any of those virtues
I lean more toward Bill Pronzini in regard to Horler, but certainly understand what you are saying, and as for Horler the man, he may well be the most repellant personality to put pen to paper in the genre — including Dornford Yates (William Cecil Mercer) who was a good writer but a total pain as a human being by all accounts.
But I do think in the case of Thayer you will be lucky if you stumble upon a good one that is really worth the effort, and in her case the effort is considerable.
February 2nd, 2011 at 6:40 am
J.F.
Another writer of the period who regularly tackled impossible crimes — in fact specialised in them — was Thomas Hanshew, who with his wife Mary chronicled the adventures of Cleek. Their stories and novels abound with locked rooms and impossible crimes, some quite well executed and explained to the extent Cleek was a great favorite of the young John Dickson Carr.
Arsene Lupin also ran afoul of more than his fair share of odd crimes with a bizarre twist and some excellent solutions, including THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE (1920)where the treasure of gold everyone is looking for is laying in plain sight ala Poe’s famous letter.
February 2nd, 2011 at 7:42 am
I’ve read 4 of Lee Thayer’s 60 novels.
None of these 4 are good enough to recommend to general readers of mystery fiction.
The best plotted is Q.E.D. (1921). It has a decent impossible crime plot. Also some lyrical nature writing of wood-and-water scenes: a Thayer speciality, that shows up in other novels.
Unfortunately, the book also has some racist slurs. This makes it impossible to recommend.
According to Adey, Thayer wrote 5 impossible crime novels. Another is the one J.F. reviewed, The Mystery of the 13th Floor. Haven’t read this, or the other 3. They are probably the next stop for research.
I like sleuth Peter Clancy, moderately. Dislike his valet Wiggar, moderately. Am startled by J.F.’s description of Peter Clancy as a teenager! By the time of That Affair at “The Cedars” (1920-1921), Clancy is a grown man, a private investigator who’s been in the US Secret Service during World War I.
I keep trying to find good books from the history of mystery fiction, to recommend to today’s readers. So far, I’m having problems with Lee Thayer. She had talent, but never seems to “put it all together” and come up with a solid first rate book.
February 2nd, 2011 at 8:58 am
Stop the Presses:
Lee Thayer appeared on the TV game show, “What’s My Line?”
It’s available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU92EAsH3Fk
She seems like a gracious lady.
February 2nd, 2011 at 10:10 am
Thanks for the link, Mike. She looks exactly like I thought Lee Thayer would look.
February 2nd, 2011 at 11:13 am
I’ll repeat Walker’s thanks for the link, Mike. It’s great to be able to put a face to the name, and as Walker says, after all of the comments about her and her work, how could she look any differently?
Something else has occurred to me to ask. Lee, as a first name, is a lot more ambiguous than Emma, for example, as to the gender of a person. Did a good percentage of her reading audience believe that Lee Thayer was male? Tie that in with a male detective with a male valet, and I’m starting to wonder.
Over the period of her writing career, was any biographical information about her included on the jacket flaps or back cover?
— Steve
February 2nd, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Thanks for the link, it’s nice to be able to see these writers, even minor ones like Lee Thayer! I can see why she lived a long time, she could have passed for her being in her sixties there.
February 2nd, 2011 at 5:50 pm
Mike Nevins has just informed me that his next column for this blog will consist of a piece he wrote about Lee Thayer several years, but never published until now.
February 2nd, 2011 at 6:06 pm
I’ll have to get myself to read something by her now and see if it’s as bad as all that….I picked up a few books be her because she was an American writing in the traditional form during the Golden Age.
February 2nd, 2011 at 6:12 pm
I’m still holding open the possibility that there are some good books in Lee Thayer’s canon.
The books I read were not generally “bad”. They just tended to be too routine or too mediocre to recommend.
Unfortunately, I’ve never seen a really positive contemporary review of anything by Thayer, that names a good book by her.
It is all very inconclusive…
February 2nd, 2011 at 6:28 pm
Will Cuppy liked some of Lee Thayer’s books in the 1930s. Boucher, as Nevins knows, was quite meh about her in the 1940s and 1950s.
I’ve got three from the thirties, will give them a look.
Dodd, Mead held on to her for a long time! Of course they also held on to John Rhode, even in the 1950s, when he was getting really dull (and I’m a fan).
February 2nd, 2011 at 7:26 pm
Curt
Re Dodd & Mead hanging onto Thayer and Rhode, mystery publishers used to have what was known as a mid-list stable of writers whose sales were steady if not spectacular, and who did well with the lending library circuit. Thayer and Rhode both fell into that category by the late fifties and early sixties. They had reader and publisher loyalty going for them, despite any fall off of quality (or in Thayer’s case none present to begin with).
Also there was a certain amount of loyalty between publishers and writers and the business was a good deal less cut throat than it is today. Older writers who had once sold well, and maintained a small but core audience were often maintained by affectionate editors and publishers, and there was probably a certain prestige to keeping Thayer and Rhode on.
Other writers like Carroll John Daly and Harry Stephen Keeler couldn’t even get their last books published in this country.
Mike
Re Thayer, I’m reminded of Gertrude Stein’s famous comment about Oakland, California: “There’s no there there.”
I’ll give Thayer this, she wrote exactly what she wanted and the way she wanted. She isn’t really bad, its just there is nothing much going on in her books and they never rise to the level of clever plots, interesting characters, good dialogue, vivid setting or any of the other things that might keep you wanting to read them. Yes, individual books are better than others, but that does not mean they are really worth while.
February 3rd, 2011 at 12:31 pm
First off, I need to state my astonishment — 20 comments and this very involved discussion on a mediocre mystery writer! Lee Thayer must be smiling and chuckling in the afterlife. It only took 60 or so years after her death for all the attention. I wish the review on my own blog attracted this much attention. Thanks to Steve for giving the link and to Curt and Mike G. for reading it.
David –
Hanshew! Of course. Hamilton Cleek, the Man of Forty Faces with the ability to remold his features like some kind of superhero in a Marvel Comic. How could I forget? Well, easily as a matter of fact. I have several of those books and each time I try to read them I just plain lose interest. I think I have gotten through exactly three stories in one of the books and I can’t even remember which one. Those “novels” were mostly short story collection strung together to give the appearance of a novel. Those sly editors at Doubleday Page did that often with magazine writing.
But if Carr was impressed I should perhaps try one more time – this time as a critic and historian rather than a reader looking for diversion.
Mike G. –
Thanks for the “What’s My Line?” link. That was very cool! Arlene Francis: “Mrs. Thayer you look like a very happy woman. Do you do some kind of work that makes people happy?” Loved that. Tough guy actor Robert Ryan got pretty close to guessing. Leave it to Dorothy Kilgallen (the most competitive panelist in the history of the show) to nail it. Then I loved Bennett Cerf not knowing the publisher of a woman who wrote 57 novels. “Dodd Mead. A very good publisher,” he says somewhat bitterly. HA!
I have to add that video to my blog. Going to do it later today.
Steve —
I have owned several Thayer books from the 40s and 50s with DJs. Her picture never appeared on the rear panel or the rear flap. Don’t recall a bio even. What little I learned about her (especially her being an being an artist) I got from the Penzler and Steinbrunner’s Encyclopedia of Mystery Fiction. Then over the years made a note of her work on OTHER books. One of her most significant DJs is the cover for the 1st US edition of Nobel prize winning Sigrid Unset’s novel Kristin Lavransdatter. It’s a remarkably colorful portrait.
Final word on The Mystery of the 13th Floor:
The solution to the impossible crime is one that has turned up in three books I have read in near succession. All three having to do with stabbing in a locked room. Thayer’s was in 1919. The other two were Cortland Fitzsimmon’s awful Red Rhapsody in 1930s and, the book I just finished reading and will write up for my blog, Corpses at Indian Stones by Philip Wylie in 1943. And it probably occurs in hundreds of other. I wonder if Thayer’s idea was the absolute first time this method of stabbing was used in the genre. Hmm… More reading will tell. Of course I’ll have to really dig in the dusty tomes to discover this.
John
February 3rd, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Curt —
As for Carolyn Wells I have an odd predilection for her very early works. I am planning an article on Pennington Wise and his girl sidekick Zizi as one of the “Neglected Detectives” series coming soon. And now that you inform me of her fantastical/nonsensical plots I can’t resist delving in full force. I’m going to read ALL the Fleming Stone books I have amassed over the years hoping that some of them will yield the bizarreness that I usually crave in “alternative classics.” We can form a mini Wells Society of sorts. Do you think it’ll catch on?
John
February 3rd, 2011 at 5:22 pm
John
Re Comment #21. Thanks for confirming what I suspected about Dodd Mead not going out of their way to let people who bought and read her books know that Lee Thayer was female.
Though I doubt that many people actually bought her books, only libraries. I haven’t researched this, but I can’t remember any of her books coming out in paperback either.
She was a publishing phenomenon, all right, in the small world of mystery fiction. A long, long career of writing pleasant-enough books (neither good nor outstandingly bad) without ever writing an exceptional one — but if anyone ever tells me about one that stands above the rest, I’d like to know about it.
(Yes, I know. Mike Nevins calls OUT BRIEF CANDLE one of her best, so someone is going to have to read all 59 to prove him wrong.)
February 3rd, 2011 at 6:37 pm
Well, I started a Lee Thayer from the 1930s, so I will let you know! So far not-good-but-not-bad-exactly pretty aptly describes it.
For a book authored ostensibly by a man, the male characters spend an inordinate amount time talking about their hobbies of rose gardening and china collecting, but maybe those activities were all the rage in smarter upper-class male sets in those days.
Yes, I would suspect someone like Thayer sold mostly to the rental libraries (she also was published some in UK). But say she sold 2000 copies of a title a year in the US and each copy was rented twenty times, so that’s possibly 40,000 American readers. Okay, it’s not Micky Spillane, but it’s not nuthin’ neither!
February 3rd, 2011 at 7:45 pm
John
Granted the Hanshew’s can be hard going, lots of melodrama and rather flowery writing, but some of the solutions are fairly good and the impossible crimes cleverly solved. I suspect that was what Carr enjoyed. There is a fairly good one where the crime is committed in a penthouse factory with glass walls and roof — I think in CLEEK OF SCOTLAND YARD.
Yes, the fix-up, as SF fans called the cobbling of shorts stories into a ‘novel’, was fairly common back then, especially since many writers first sold their work in the pulps or slicks in short forms. Most of R.T.M. Scott’s Aurelius Smith books were like than as was John McIntyre’s Ashton Kirk books, and for that matter Stevenson’s NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS.
Curt
I think the word for Thayer is ‘bland.’ Almost unremittingly blanc, to the point that even on the rare occaission she comes up with a good idea or a decent scene it is surrounded by and enveloped by a weight of cotton wool and down comforters that smother it.
Almost every book I recall reading by her was at least 20,000 and maybe 30,000 words longer than it should have been, padded out with material that went nowhere and had little or nothing to do with plot.
She was very much the kind of writer who would stop the plot to discuss the best type of fertilizer for growing roses.
Her mysteries are a bit like doilies — you may admire the skill it takes to make one, but what’s the point?
February 3rd, 2011 at 11:11 pm
Okay, things pick up a bit with the actual murder (there may have been two earlier ones, but these were off-stage). Clancy doesn’t strike me as an Edwardian gentleman, despite the attendant Wiggar–he even refers to “dames”!
But this isn’t supposed to be live blogging, so will write up as a review.
It’s at least more credible than Carolyn Wells (Lee Thayer was a dozen years younger).
February 3rd, 2011 at 11:55 pm
John
You were surprised how many comments this entry generated, and I think I can explain for many of us. For those of us who began collecting in the fifties and sixties Thayer’s work was fairly ubiquitous.
Most libraries had a few Thayer books and they were not uncommon in second hand books stores (usually the later ones). I don’t think I ever read one that wasn’t an ex library book though.
Many of us tried a few Thayer’s there being no place at the time to check her out before hand, and no way to know what we were getting into.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I recall the Thayer’s I read over the years as a chore — not bad books exactly — just endless and unrewarding.
She is a good deal more obscure now than she was then — she was still being published then.
Again, I think we mistake what her appeal was to her readers — largely in the lending library circuit, and, I suspect, largely female.
I think they enjoyed the comfort offered, a fairly simply puzzle, a relatively generic sleuth in Peter Clancy, and an overall genteel approach to the genre — a nice upper middle class kind of murder where nothing too disturbing or shocking was going to upset the reader.
It may surprise many of us who are looking for more, but there was a huge audience (and still is) for a sort of generic mystery which is bland if not cozy. Today these tend to still be mostly written by women and often spend as much or more time with charcter’s hobbies and relationships than the mystery involved.
Thayer and Carolyn Wells both fall into that category to a certain extent. In that way they are almost above criticism, because nothing critics could say really effected or hurt their sales. Readers read the books because they wanted exactly the things we are complaining about. Trying to find some secret or special quality in their works may be missing the point.
They are the Graham Crackers of mystery fiction. Innofensive and consistent were the by words of their success.
February 4th, 2011 at 11:25 pm
Here’s a short note I received earlier today from UK mystery book dealer Jamie Sturgeon:
“One of the great unsellable authors. I only have one customer for her. I checked all the books of hers I have in stock (many), not a single word on the author in any of them, including the odd American copy.”
February 5th, 2011 at 2:43 am
I’m surprised she was even published that much in UK, though they weren’t the top publishers (Carolyn Wells and Mary Roberts Rinehart were not well-published in the UK, I believe). In the U.S. Dodd, Mead, on the other hand, had a lot of top authors.
February 5th, 2011 at 11:51 am
Checking both authors in Hubin, almost all of Lee Thayer’s books were published in the UK, although many of the titles were changed.
Perhaps they’re not directly comparable, since their careers overlapped only in part, but about 80% of Carolyn Wells mysteries appeared in the UK. (I didn’t take the time to do an exact computation.)
What I found interesting, and amusing, in Jamie’s comment, is how hard he finds it to sell any of her books. (He doesn’t sell only to UK buyers.)
That plus the fact that once again, Thayer’s publishers, here or there, did not go out of their way to make it known that she was female.
— Steve
February 5th, 2011 at 1:17 pm
Jamie’s comment is funny, but at the same time, who in the U.S. is going to go to an English seller to buy Lee Thayer? I’m sure she’s not “in demand” in either country though. I have five titles, but then I have about everyone!
I didn’t realize that much of Carolyn Wells was published in UK! I have never seen her books reviewed there.
February 5th, 2011 at 8:27 pm
Thayer wasn’t reviewed much and the critics tended to keep an icy silence save for a nice word from Will Cuppy, but she sold well enough in her niche, which in this country was largely the lending libraray circuit.
She was probably near the top of the midlist at least through the thirties and into the early fifties and likely ranked highly in the library market.
Howard Haycraft gives her even shorter shrift than he did Carolyn Wells, which seems to be the general opinion of most genre critics.
Barzun and Taylor described her work as “pleasant pre war pieces, often with a New York scene,” which may be the nicest review I’ve ever seen of her work.
Indeed this blog may be the most ever written about her within the genre. That really isn’t unusual though Quite a few fairly successful writers labored successfully in the genre without engendering a good deal of comment. Indeed in most cases the names we know are only the cream of the crop with many perfectly successful writers laboring in near anonymity throughout their careers — read and appreciated during their day, and forgotten today.
February 5th, 2011 at 8:42 pm
I will finish the Thayer soon and review (yes I spend sat. nights reading Lee Thayer, though I’m also writing an article and working on a proposal). I wouldn’t use Nevins’ harsher adjectives about it, but I do find that I’m not exactly feeling driven to finish the book!
I love how we spend this much time discussing such obscure old books here. Somebody should do it! It’s all part of our cultural history.
February 8th, 2011 at 8:15 pm
[…] novel I chose to concentrate on in my Thayer entry for 1001 Midnights was Out, Brief Candle!, which like Christie’s Death in the Air (1935) is about a murder on an airliner in […]
February 24th, 2016 at 12:21 am
Coming to the party five years late! Torquemada in the Observer reviewed some of her books. And liked them! One book is “really brilliant” and another is “first rate”.
DEAD STORAGE / DEATH WEED (10 Nov 1935) ++
The Death Weed is a Peter Clancy tale with a really brilliant dénouement. In it Lee Thayer has added another triumph to her long list of successes; I wish she would draw her own sex just a little better.
SUDDEN DEATH / RED HANDED (15 March 1936) +
The pantoum method of constructing a detective story has been used before, and nearly always successfully. And it succeeds, I think, in proportion to our sympathy with the motive for the crime. As Miss Thayer has used it with marked success in her latest Peter Clancy yarn, I must not let my definition go beyond the Malayan word, which, after all, was good enough for Mr. Wells when he wrote The Man Who Could Work Miracles. In Red-Handed our red-headed friend, complete with Man Wiggar, moves as a sort of torch through the gloom of just such a house as we like our corpses to be found in.
DEAD END STREET, NO OUTLET / MURDER IN THE MIRROR (30 Aug 1936) =
Lee Thayer has already proved himself a fine builder of eerie structures, and the house which, in the course of their present investigation, Peter Clancy and his man Wiggar enter, as chauffeur and butler respectively, has a most unpleasant atmosphere; but the mechanics of the murder attempted in it will fail a little of suspense and horror to those who remember Dr. Freeman’s “Apparition of Burling Court”, and still more his “Mandarin’s Pearl”. Also Peter does not, for once, have to do much intensive sleuthing; blind luck takes him to the centre of a circle which he has been suspiciously exploring for four years, and the subsequent essential piece of detection is done by a pleasant kitten. Yet I stayed up late to finish Murder in the Mirror, for I found it a thriller of great charm.
DARK OF THE MOON / DEATH IN THE GORGE (14 March 1937) ++
The new Peter Clancy case is worked out against a background of coon hunting in Connecticut. Lee Thayer made his last Clancy novel, Murder in the Mirror, readable by sheer charm, though the main detection was done by a kitten, and the mechanism of crime was obvious to all readers of Dr. Freeman. Death in the Gorge, on the other hand, shows real and admirable detection on Clancy’s part. It follows a favourite formula of mine: first a flurry of suspects, then the long “point” in pursuit of one emerging personality, and, finally, the sudden whip to the side which discloses the truth. Parallel to this order, and distracting us, is the feeling that an unconscious boy in hospital must know, though he cannot tell, what happened. This first-rate Thayer is remarkable for the ascension to glory of the man Wiggar.
February 23rd, 2020 at 12:52 pm
[…] around the net, I found that I’m not alone in my tepid response to Thayer. MysteryFile has a few overviews of her library, and the comment section provides some classic quotes that sums it up […]