Sun 20 Mar 2011
Murders of the Month: TIME MAGAZINE October 24, 1932.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists[18] Comments
October 24, 1932
Herewith the detective fiction books of the previous month, as selected by Time Magazine, October 24, 1932. They are listed in order of merit, as stated in the article, along with brief descriptions of the plots of each. How many have you read?
THE STUDENT FRATERNITY MURDER—Milton Prosper —Bobbs-Merrill ($2). Skilled Detective Rankin points the crime through yellow hoods and yellow hair.
THE END OF MR. GARMENT—Vincent Starrett—Crime Club ($2). Stabbing of a famed writer whom many disliked and had opportunity to kill.
THE CORPSE ON THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN—“Diplomat”—Covici, Friede ($2). A smart, lucky young diplomat solves the code, retrieves the papers, catches the murderer.
THE RESURRECTION MURDER CASE— Stanley Hart Page—Knopf ($2). Christopher Hand forces self-identification of the murderer by trickery with a skull.
POISON IN JEST—John Dickinson Carr — Harper ($2). Introducing mirth-provoking Detective Rossiter in poison cut. hatchet murder and necrophilia. [sic]
MURDER IN MARYLAND—Leslie Ford—Farrar & Rinehart ($2 ). The murder of a small town’s most hated woman solved by the town’s woman doctor.
DOUBLE DEATH—Freeman Wills Croft —Harper ($2). Sly tricks in murder on a background of railroad construction.
INSPECTOR HIGGINS HURRIES— Cecil Freeman Gregg—Dial ($2). Twenty-four hours of hurly-burly mystery-solving.
CUT THROAT — Christopher Bush — Morrow ($2). Much ado about clocks.
MURDERER’S LUCK — Henry Holt — Crime Club ($2). Multiple killings in rural England.
THE SECRET OF THE MORGUE—Frederick G. Eberhard — Macaulay ($2). Autopsy technique in a story of bootlegging and body-swapping.
THE OSTREKOFF JEWEL— E. Phillips Oppenheim—Little, Brown ($2). A young diplomat gets a princess and her jewels out of revolutionary Russia, with, of course, difficulties.
MURDER ON THE GLASS FLOOR—Viola Brothers Shore— Long & Smith ($2). A liner’s new dance floor christened by a murdered woman.
March 20th, 2011 at 7:15 pm
I have six of these and have read three. “Double Death” (Death on the Way) and Cut Throat (despite the “much ado about clocks) are good works by those authors, I think.
Poison in Jest seemed a lesser Carr to me, though there were interesting elements.
March 20th, 2011 at 7:15 pm
Much to my shock I’ve read five of these, and all but three of the writers: Carr, of course; Crofts; the Ford; the Gregg; and the Oppenheim.
The two authors I haven’t read are Viola Brothers Shore, Frederick Eberhard, and Stanley Hart Page — the latter the only one of the three whose name is familiar.
Curious too that Carr is in the middle with one of the classics of the genre, and not at the top.
I wonder if these were ranked by a staff at TIME, or by an individual critic?
March 20th, 2011 at 7:16 pm
Yes, I said two and then wrote three names. Duh?
March 20th, 2011 at 7:20 pm
The ones I have but haven’t read are the Propper, Starrett and Ford. I started the Propper some time ago and certainly would not put at the top of the list!
March 20th, 2011 at 7:52 pm
I’ll have to reread Poison in Jest sometime; there were things I liked about it. I wish Carr had used that setting more often (in addition to The Burning Court).
March 20th, 2011 at 8:13 pm
Curt
I agree POISON isn’t the best Carr, but it is the only title on the list anyone other than a handful of us is likely to have heard of or read.
Actually, I might have ranked the Diplomat first. It was a solid series despite it’s pulp origins, had a unique setting, and in general was a superior series of mysteries if not quite of the classic school. I always thought the series deserved more attention than it recieved.
Of the Crofts, well any time Crofts used a railroad background it was worth reading.
How did Bush get on anyone’s best list?
The Oppenheim is middling late Oppenheim (he kept on another nine years), but of its sort not bad — dated even then, but with the skills that once labeled EPO the ‘Prince of Storytellers.’
March 20th, 2011 at 8:54 pm
I was under the impression that this was a “best list,” too, but looking back at the article, it’s not at all that clear.
Here’s the opening statement, just before the first book is listed:
“Herewith, in order of merit, are listed detective fiction books of the past month…”
No mention of “best,” which truthfully I also assumed when I came across the list.
At the moment I’m reading Sinister Cargo by Stanley Hart Page, and having no knowledge of the author, I was trying to see what I could find out about him.
So far not much. His primary detective, who appeared in all five of his books, was a upper-middle class PI named Christopher Hand. The local police give him pretty much an open hand in solving their cases for him because he always lets them take credit for them.
As far as I’ve gotten, the one I’m reading has an “impossible crime” aspect to it. The murder takes place with two other people in the room, but if they didn’t do it, the door of the room was watched and no one else came out. And the window is locked from the inside.
Getting back to the list itself, the fact Milton “Prosper’s” book was at the top caught my eye too, and I marveled a bit at that. I should have put a [sic] next to the author’s name, which of course was Propper, something I knew so well that the error didn’t register with me until Curt and his Comment #4.
All in all, I think it was good month for detective and mystery fiction.
March 20th, 2011 at 9:37 pm
Viola Brothers Shore has been on my wish list for quite awhile.
MS MURDER edited by Marie Smith featured a collection of female detectives. “The Mackenzie Case” by Viola Brothers “Shaw” interested me a great deal. My copy has disappeared so I can’t remember much more than finding the characters, especially her amateur sleuth Gwynn Leith, fun.
Thanks to this article, I googled her correct name, Shore. The woman had a life worthy of a biography, an actress, writer, married several times, caught up in the Red Scare in the fifties. Few of her books or short stories are available but for rather high prices $15 and above.
Where is Catherine Ross Nickerson’s CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO AMERICAN CRIME FICTION when I need her.
March 20th, 2011 at 11:24 pm
Viola Brothers Shore is a name only vaguely familiar to me. I don’t have copies of either of her two books. The other is The Beauty-Mask Murder from 1930. The series characters in both books were Colin Keats and Gwynn Leith. I’ll have to Google her myself!
March 20th, 2011 at 11:26 pm
Michael
Let us hope Nickerson and friends do not stumble on Ms Shore — a much divorced actress and victim of the Red Scare — they’ll have her more important than Hammett.
March 21st, 2011 at 12:47 am
Too bad she didn’t title a novel, “The Thinner Woman.”
I never cease to be impressed by the number of people who thought they were worth a tec novel or two (or even five or six) in the twenties/thirties, however.
March 21st, 2011 at 12:51 am
Oh, by the way, The Mackenzie Case I believe is anthologized in Ellery Queen’s 101 Years’ Entertainment.
Frederic Dannay may have been purged by The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, but as an anthologist he at least was interested in work by the other gender.
March 21st, 2011 at 4:07 am
I guess one of us should point out the price of all those hardcover first editions — $2.
The equivalent today is $27.95. Even gas hasn’t risen that much in price in the same time, and as far as I know there is no writer shortage.
March 21st, 2011 at 7:41 am
I guess no one bothered or cared enough to get the authors names right.
March 21st, 2011 at 10:43 am
Most likely the original text was scanned incorrectly, the whole magazine at once, with no one assigned to clean it up afterward. Note the plot description for the Carr book. If anyone can decipher that, let me know!
March 21st, 2011 at 11:17 am
David
That $2.00 list price for those books back in 1932 does look awfully nice here and now in 2011. But aren’t most new hardcover mysteries between $25 and $30 today? Except on Amazon, of course, where most are discounted quite a bit, up to nearly 50% off.
Of the books on the 1932, which would be the most valuable today, if someone had bought it, brought it home and stored it in some dark space that was also clean and dry?
The Carr perhaps…
… the best I could come up with on ABE was a copy in VG Plus condition with only a facsimile jacket for $150. Sounds like the $2 investment back then might have paid off. Better than a bank account with a simple 6% annual rate of interest over an 80 year period (around $210).
March 21st, 2011 at 2:44 pm
“Murders of the Month” was a column that appeared in TIME Magazine beginning some time in 1932 and continuing on up through 1934 or so, perhaps not every month, but regularly enough to be worth looking into.
I haven’t come across any of these columns that were signed, and it isn’t always clear that the books are listed in order of merit, as this one was.
You can check these columns out by typing (or pasting) into the Google search box the following:
site:time.com “murders of the month”
March 21st, 2011 at 6:35 pm
I noted the prices and my first thought was about price-fixing — collusion among the publishers.
It’s interesting, as noted earlier, that a book by Carr — even one of his middling efforts — was only rated the fifth-best of the month.