Wed 9 Feb 2011
Reviewed by Curt Evans: LEE THAYER – The Scrimshaw Millions.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[6] Comments
LEE THAYER – The Scrimshaw Millions. Sears & Co., hardcover, 1932. Hardcover reprint: The Macaulay Company, no date.
There are five killings in the tale, yet The Scrimshaw Millions is not remotely exciting. What should have been a gripping family extermination murder story on the order of S. S. Van Dine’s grandly baroque The Greene Murder Case (1928), instead is a snoozer the reader has to drive himself to finish.
But finish it I did, dear readers! It takes a lot to stop this fellah from plowing through to the end of a Golden Age whodunit, even a fourth- or fifth-tier one. Heck, I’ve read a dozen mysteries by Carolyn Wells!
In The Scrimshaw Millions someone is fatally poisoning the members of the Scrimshaw family one by one. A fortune is at stake — who will survive to inherit? And how long will it take for you to cease caring one iota?
To be fair, The Scrimshaw Millions struck me as superior to the books described earlier on this blog by Francis M. Nevins. The prose is serviceable, lacking those purple passages quoted by Nevins (at least until the cosmic retribution denouement Nevins has noted as a common feature of her books).
The characters, while sticks, are not irritating (except when meant to be — though perhaps we could have done without the Italian houseservant/blackmailer, regrettably named Guido). Generally speaking, you can believe this tale is taking place in the 1930s rather than a half-century earlier, unlike Carolyn Wells’ mysteries from the same decade.
Moreover, the clueing is respectable. And the murder means used in the five killings is…. Well, while it’s not original to Thayer (and John Rhode used it in a detective novel three years later, though only for a murder attempt late in the book), it’s kind of cute, in Golden Age Baroque fashion.
However, fatal weaknesses in The Scrimshaw Millions are its slack narrative, its sometimes careless writing and its lack of credible police procedure and scientific detail.
I have read the claim that the hugely prolific thriller writer Edgar Wallace, who boasted of being able to compose novels over weekends, in the course of one tale managed to change the name of his heroine (i.e., she starts off as Janet, say, and becomes Betty). Yet I had never come across such a phenomenon myself in an Edgar Wallace shocker, or, indeed, in a mystery tale by any other author — until I read Lee Thayer.
In The Scrimshaw Millions the secretary of that late, unlamented miser, Simon Scrimshaw, is introduced on page 51 as “Evangeline Osgood.” Yet five pages later her surname has changed to “Ogden.”
And there’s more! Although we are told for most of the tale that Simon’s two spinster sisters — thought at first to have died from heart failure–were both poisoned by “aconite” (I think “aconotine” was meant), late in the book the poison abruptly becomes arsenic.
All in all, I think it’s fair to say Lee Thayer was playing fast and loose with poisons, as well as with police procedure, in The Scrimshaw Millions. For no credible reason whatsover, three different poisons are used to slay in the tale, all by the same individual murderer: the alchemical aconite/aconotine/arsenic concoction, nicotine and cyanide (the last is later called hydrocyanic acid).
One might have thought this might have made the police suspicious of the character we are told works in a chemical factory, but, nope! It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone even to cock an eyebrow.
You might also think the murderer would have had to have been mad to adopt such an approach to attaining an inheritance. Well, hold on to your hats, it looks like he was:
Nearly forty years ago, Julian Symons labeled certain formerly quite popular and highly regarded detective novelists like John Rhode (a peudonym of Cecil John Charles Street) as “humdrums.” Other, more recent, mystery genre survey authors like P.D. James have followed suit, adopting Symons’ disparaging tone toward these writers.
Yet, compared to Lee Thayer, I say please, Lord, give me more “humdrums” like John Rhode. The use Rhode makes of science in his tales often is quite fascinating, ingenious, adroit and credible. In The Scrimshaw Millions none of those adjectives can be applied to Thayer’s (mis)use of science.
Traditionalist American mystery writers of the Golden Age of detection like Lee Thayer and Carolyn Wells often aped, as much they could, the form and milieu of detective novels of superior British counterparts.
Thayer, for example, clearly seems to have deliberately copied Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter/Bunter master-servant relationship with her own series detective, red-haired Peter Clancy, and his impeccable English manservant, Wiggar (the latter character was introduced by Thayer in 1929, ten years after she had debuted Clancy and six years after Sayers gave the world Lord Peter and Bunter). But Thayer and Wells are but pale shadows of far more substantial authors (and to be sure, there were many first-rate American traditionalists as well).
Still, the patented Lee Thayer cosmic retribution denouement so aptly described by Mike Nevins is impressive in its own loopy way. In The Scrimshaw Millions the entire house of the murdered miser falls in on the investigators and suspects just after the killer, pressed by the intrepid detective Peter Clancy, makes his mad confession:
Top that if you can, Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot! Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted the roof to collapse on one of those drawing room lectures David Suchet gives in every darn one of his TV productions.
Providentially, one might say, only the mad murderer is killed when the house collapses in The Scrimshaw Millions. The nice boy lives to marry the nice girl, the policemen survive to continue getting murder cases all wrong, and Wiggar escapes the wreckage to continue happily serving his mildly concussed master Peter Clancy in many another perhaps-something-less-than-entirely-enthralling Lee Thayer mystery.
February 9th, 2011 at 1:47 pm
It has been fun following all this discussions over the dull side of the classic mystery. With the puzzle mystery or English drawing room mystery or cozy or whatever it is called the line between dull and good is very thin for many readers. I have always found it more entertaining and easier to explain the work that fails than the work that succeeds.
I am curious over who was Thayer’s editor. Mistakes as different names for characters and poisons should have been caught and corrected by the editor.
I also am willing to bet the main appeal of Thayer to many (?) was her fear of God endings. As much of the appeal of mysteries is the restoration of order out of chaos, God’s help with the ending would satisfy many.
February 9th, 2011 at 2:39 pm
I have belatedly looked up aconite, which apparently is the plant (monkshood), and aconotine is the name of the poison it contains:
http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/a/aconi007.html
That’s minor. The big problem is that there’s no connection either way with arsenic. That should have been caught, no doubt about it.
As for the Osgood/Ogden mixup, perhaps the secretary in question got married sometime in the intervening five pages.
OK. I don’t believe that one either.
February 9th, 2011 at 5:41 pm
Sears was a slap dash publisher. A book I wrote about dismissively in my “Reading List of 2010” post (The Screaming Portrait) includes a statement that a character went tiger hunting in South Africa – an utter impossibility as tigers are only found in Asia. No surprise then that this Thayer book had numerous and obivous errors that went overlooked.
I have since learned these errors usually happen when a book that was previously serialized in a magazine was sold to a book publisher and they quickly typeset it as received from the magazine without ever bothering to check for errors. As we have learned from Walker’s contribution in this ongoing Thayer dissection/discussion, her work did appear in the pulp magazines of the day. We should probably be looking to place blame on the original magazine editors.
This is one of the funnier reviews posted here. I laughed at loud reading several of Curt’s quips. Thanks, Curt, for a more light-hearted thumbs down review.
February 9th, 2011 at 6:49 pm
Graham Greene quotes a passage from Edgar Wallace where a character’s appearance changes in mid paragraph, but it’s an overall favorable article.
This review is a shade kinder than I actually recall my reaction to any of the Thayer books I read, but could be a slightly better book. As for the obvious mistakes you would think an editor would catch, think again. I read a recent book by a major hardcover publisher where a character makes the drive from Gibraltar to Cannes in two hours — and its over a 1000 miles.
Even John Vandercook, a good writer of mystery fiction, makes a lunheaded mistake about the nature of radiation in one of his Bertram Lynch books.
Accuracy is pretty much up to the writer with all but a few publishers. and we have all run across some real howlers in even the best books, whether it is fractured prose, nonsensical metaphors, physical impossibilities, or geographic anomalies. Ross Macdonald’s ‘prone on his face’ comes to mind.
Oh, and John, re those South African tigers I wonder if they are related to the one Tarzan encounterd in the original serilaization of TARZAN OF THE APES, or to the “African Rattlesnake” in Dumas novel GEORGES? For that matter, they could be cousins of Conan Doyle’s non existent ‘scarlet band.’
Curt
Humdrum John Rhode could be, and sometimes was, but the comparison to Thayer is insubstantial. Rhode at his best — and as you know he was at his best very often in the early days and middle period of his career — was a careful plotter and even managed some decent thriller elements.
Thayer and Wells have always been connected in my mind because they both wrote a sort of mystery that was very popular at one time, and yet pretty much undermines all the arguments about mystery readers loving fair play and the game. To me they wrote slightly stale marshmallows of books, but in all fairness their readers seemed to be hungry for slightly stale marshmallow.
February 9th, 2011 at 8:34 pm
I thought a striking difference between this Thayer and a Rhode from the same era, say Poison for One or The Claverton Mystery or Death at Breakfast is that there are five poisonings with three different poisons (actually six, I think, if you count the slip-ups), but their handling is so generic it doesn’t matter one whit. There is no medical detail in the book except this: the victims were poisoned, and they died.
Lee Thayer even has a mystery named “Poison,” so you might have thought she’d have something to say about it here, but, no, she doesn’t. Her handling of it is completely generic.
Some Golden age mystery writers really took the time to inform themselves on certain subjects of crime and mortality, but not Lee Thayer (or Carolyn Wells). P.D. James has written rather mockingly of British Golden Age writers not knowing much about science or the law, but if you compare Rhode or Christie or Freeman or Sayers on poison to this Lee Thayer book–well, there simply is no comparison.
Barzun wrote that Patricia Wentowrth was for the “tired reader,” and I would say this is true as well of Thayer and Wells (actually more so, since Wentworth had some literary skill). But they certainly illustrate what a certain segment of the mystery readership in the U.S. was like and how far away it was from the “hardboiled” world. Apparently there was a substantial market for bland, comforting, status quo embracing mysteries that didn’t tax the brain too hard (this explains J. S. Fletcher too, though he had more narrative skill).
John, I’m glad the review made you laugh. That’s the best thing about such books: they inspire the Bill Pronzini “alternative classic” style review!
February 14th, 2011 at 5:42 pm
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