Wed 22 Jun 2022
CLIFFORD RAYMOND – The Men on the Dead Man’s Chest. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1930.
Most mystery fans surely know what a tontine is by now, but if not, what it is is a special kind of annuity that provides for a certain regular amount to be shared among several beneficiaries over a period of time, but with the principal held in trust for the final survivor.
The implications are obvious, are they not? In fact, revenge can be made to reach from beyond the grave, as six former friends of an unsavory gentleman named Turner quickly discover.
According to Who Done It?, this was the last 1nystery novel that Clifford Raymond wrote. While he did write three earlier during the period 1917-21, the influence of the new Black Mask style on his later work is obvious. The Chicago police lieutenant named Stanton who investigates the curious string of deaths caused by Turner’s will is cool and crisp, and incisively sardonic without ever actually being hard-boiled. This is the Chicago of prohibition and Al Capone, and the reader is never allowed to forget it.
Numerous footnotes give an unusual air of documentary authenticity to the whole affair, but I have to confess that I didn’t understand the last one at all. The last page of a book is an awfully strange place to completely unexplain what until then had seemed a fairly straightforward tale of over-stimulated greed.
Nevertheless, the. combination of tough gangster fiction with a hint of underlying amusement makes the author’s final bow decidedly above average. The episode of the Vermont lawyer in itself makes this book worth hunting down. Why Raymond never wrote another mystery someone else will have to say.
Rating: B
UPDATE: The last line may not be entirely true. One additional title is now listed in Hubin with a dash, suggesting that it is marginally criminous, that being Our Very Best People (Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).
June 22nd, 2022 at 7:57 pm
A quote provided by an online bookseller either from the book or a blurb about the book reads thusly:
“Dunn Clayton was shot Sept 29, 1928, at midnight as he sat at a table in the Dutch Mill dance restaurant on the near North Side of Chicago. The Dutch Mill was closed by federal padlock three months later for selling ginger ale with tall glasses and cracked ice to its patrons.”
June 22nd, 2022 at 8:57 pm
The ur-hardboiled novel is an interesting side-line of what came after or was developing on the side. Even Vincent Starret’s Jimmy Lavender encounters a tommy-gun shooting up a Chicago speakeasy.
Gordon Young’s Don Everhard, some of Richard Wetgen’s South Seas stories, Frank Packard’s Jimmy Dale, the Gray Seal, who is still a romantic masked man of an earlier era, but operates in a fairly realistic milieu of criminality, poverty, and underworld slang are all early examples.
Take away the hero’s royal title and noble cause and Sue’s MYSTERIES OF PARIS with its accurate street argot and realistically portrayed underworld, Hugo’s LES MISERABLES, Dickens OLIVER TWIST, and Feval’s Black Hats are all on the border of modern hardboiled fiction.
Twain, Crane, London, and Hemingway get credit for the voice, but you can see the setting and atmosphere developing from CALEB WILLIAMS on side by side with the more romantic mystery to the point in VALLEY OF FEAR half the book is a classic Sherlock Holmes adventure and half very nearly a hardboiled private eye novel.
Of course, the hardboiled crime story developed along with its more formal puzzle cousin in the Newgate Callendar and the tales of the Bow Street Runners, in elements of Vidoq, even in the tales of Cooper and Scott.
What is notable here is how established that voice was already becoming in telling a certain kind of story. It would become the American voice in fiction to the point you even see it in not only modern literary fiction but in French, Scandinavian, and even Japanese noir.
By 1930 it was well on its way to becoming the preferred way to tell certain kinds of stories, particularly if the writer wanted to give a bit of verisimilitude to a story with a more formal plot as here.
Even S. S. Van Dine moved a little towards it in THE KIDNAP MURDER CASE where Philo Vance even gets involved in a car chase and shootout. Ellery Queen briefly teams with a private detective as well. Some more fanciful formal writers make a little fun of the genre, but more borrow from it as Baynard Kendrick did with Duncan MacLain or Rex Stout with Nero Wolfe and Philip Marlowe… I mean Archie Goodwin.
June 23rd, 2022 at 10:08 am
From Eugene Sue to Archie Goodwin. Thanks, David! You can’t get any more comprehensive than that. And it looks as though this minor entry by Raymond is a solid part of it. I wish I remembered more of it. I’d also like to know more about his first book, THE MYSTERY OF HARTLEY HOUSE, which he wrote 13 years earlier, and what changes in his style took place over the years.
All I’ve found about it is the cover, below. I don’t get the feeling that it’s hardboiled at all, but that’s all, just a feeling: