DONALD McNUTT DOUGLAS – Rebecca’s Pride. Harper, hardcover, 1956. Pocket Books. #1178, 1957. Avon PN321, paperback, 1970. Carroll & Graf, paperback, 1984.

   Rebecca’s Pride is a great home that was formerly a mil1 in the middle of the cane fields on an unnamed Caribbean island; and the man who must investigate the strange events that happen there is police captain Bolivar Manchenil. Manchenil is the “nasty” surname chosen by his grandfather when he was freed from slavery, and it comes from the “lovely, curiously shaped but poisonous tree.”

   Although the captain does not understand why his grandfather would choose to call himself after a tree that has been an agent of death to many, he does not trouble himself about it; he is a man who more or less accepts the world around him at face value.

   When a report comes in that there are “woolies” (ghosts) at the mill, Manchenil must investigate. The owner, a wealthy man named Fordyce (“Dice”) Wales, has not been at his island retreat for many months, and the place is supposedly closed up.

   But there is a light on the third floor, and when Manchenil and two U.S. Treasury men who have been looking for Wales investigate, they find his maggot-infested corpse in the central supporting column where the machinery once was — a place that only a person familiar with mills of this type would have known about. Moreover, when the autopsy is performed, it turns out Wales was poisoned with the juice of the manchenil tree — a method that a native of the island is likely to have used.

   The captain’s inquiries begin with the Von Schook family, to whom the Pride once belonged — and in whose home, coincidentally, Manchenil was raised. There seems to have been some connection between Wales and a Von Schook daughter-in-law, Estralita (who is no paragon of virtue), and surprisingly also with Hannah, a daughter who is an actress living in New York.

   When Manchenil learns that Hannah not only was Wales’s fiancee but also is due to inherit some $40 million now that he is dead, his loyal ties to the family who raised him are strained nearly to the breaking point. Manchenil continues his investigation, however, in his typical low-key manner, until the events set in motion by Dice Wales’s death escalate to an exciting conclusion.

   Rebecca’s Pride, which won a deserved Edgar for Best First Novel of 1956, has recently been reissued in paperback by Carroll & Graf. Douglass wrote only two other books, both featuring the likable, contemplative police captain: Many Brave Hearts (1958) and Saba’s Treasure (1961).

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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.