Sun 17 Jul 2022
Archived Mystery Review by Maryell Cleary: LEE THAYER – Guilt Edged.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
LEE THAYER – Guilt Edged. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1951. Unicorn Mystery Book Club, hardcover, four-in-one edition. No paperback edition.
Here’s a book that has everything – old N’Orleans atmosphere, poor but grand old Southern. families., Creole legends, faithful family retainers (“colored” servants), an inexplicable stabbing, a lovely girl — but why go on? The detective is Peter Clancy, with his English “man” Wiggar. They work along with good-natured, but not too swift Chief of Detectives Burns.
The trouble is that Peter Clancy is not too swift either. His reason for being in New Orleans is a mysterious letter – anonymous and made up of cut-out printed words, of course — with an enclosure, a gold certificate for $1000. For those of us who don’t remember, gold certificates are yellow on one side. “Guilt edged,” get it?
Despite the scattering of clues wholesale in front of Clancy’s eyes, he sleuths away on other tracks until light finally dawns. Long after it dawned on me. Sorry, folks, good detect1ng it ain’t; if you like atmosphere laid on with a trowel, it may be for you.
July 17th, 2022 at 9:17 pm
Our local library had several Thayer novels from early on and later in her career, and they were each and every one awful.
Clancy is thicker than Fleming Stone and nearly as annoying, the books just drag on long after you have lost any interest in who did it, why, who it happened to, or if it ever gets solved, and the writing is just colorless save for when it is briefly purple.
I’m not sure I could even justify recommending Thayer even on historical grounds, because she isn’t as significant as Wells save for the sheer length of time she managed to hang on with an audience who found something in her and the red haired Clancy I never could.
I’m sure there are exceptions in her work. Anyone writing that long over that long a period successfully must have by sheer luck stumbled on a few decent puzzles and solutions and I am willing to admit I am probably being unfair to her (but not much, Haycraft gives her shorter shrift than Carolyn Wells).
She does come out of the pre Van Dine pre fair play school when the rules of the game were fairly loose and readers not as rigorous as later. The problem for me is in part that Clancy and Wiggar never have faces. They remain little more than names and a few eccentricities without ever developing one iota of humanity, not even the cardboard kind.
Early, mid, and late Thayer are virtually indistinguishable without checking for the publishing date or looking at the cover design.
This one is 1951 and you probably couldn’t really tell it was written more than twenty years after her first one. All I can say of her, is she didn’t get worse with time. She was never that good in the first place, but she did sell well enough they kept publishing new ones long past the time you would have expected most publishers to give up.
This is one of the few times I have ever seen Thayer reviewed in all my reading and collecting years. She and Clancy are most often ignored or pushed to one side like a slightly eccentric aunt the family doesn’t like to talk about.
I’m hoping Mike Grost can be a bit fairer to her and perhaps knows some of her better titles. I’m afraid my dedication to the history of the genre wasn’t strong enough to handle more than a few Thayer books.
July 17th, 2022 at 9:49 pm
Mike Nevins reviewed three of Thayer’s mysteries a while back in one of his monthly columns:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=58191
“Over the decades I’ve acquired a fair number of Thayers, and read a lot of them too. Frankly, they’re awful. Characters thinner than onion-skin paper, dime-novel prose, murder methods straight out of wackadoodledom — she had it all. Maybe that’s why I keep revisiting her. Maybe I just have a masochistic streak. Anyway, I recently decided to devote a column to a randomly selected trio of her works.”
He devoted an earlier column about her as well:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=7756
“As a mystery writer she’s almost completely forgotten, and perhaps that’s the way it should be, because by ordinary standards there’s very little to recommend her. Feeble plots, clumsy writing, laughable characterizations, elephantine pace, zero fairness to the reader: you name the fault and Thayer’s books have it in spades.”
Here’s Mike’s 1001 MIDNIGHTS review of OUT, BRIEF CANDLE:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=7619
“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!'”
On the basis of one of Mike’s columns Curtis Evans reviewed another one which he thought better than the ones Mike reviewed:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=7839
Even so, he also had this to say:
“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.”
July 17th, 2022 at 10:27 pm
As Lurch says “You rang?”
I duly review six Thayer novels on my website.
The best is her first book “The Mystery of the thirteenth Floor”.
Many Thayer books have bits of virtue. Clancy can be interesting. Initial investigations often are sound.
The books rarely succeed as a whole.
Worst are the sometimes racist remarks.
But Thayer evolved. She condemns a racist cop in “Evil Root”.