LESLIE FORD – The Woman in Black

Popular Library K63; reprint paperback, December1963. Hardcover: Charles Scribner’s Sons, May 1947. British hardcover: Collins (Crime Club), 1948. US hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 1948 [3-in-1 edition]. Other US paperback editions: Dell #447, mapback, 1950; Popular Library 60-2443, circa 1969. Magazine appearance: The Saturday Evening Post, a seven-part weekly serial from January 18 through March 1, 1947.

   As far as I can recall, this is the first mystery by Leslie Ford that I can recall reading. In doing so, it was with a small amount of bias, shall we say, when I started, having been given negative impressions about her work from others who have read her recently. This negativity was said to lie in Ms. Ford’s attitudes toward racial minorities, but perhaps by 1947, when The Woman in Black was published, this lack of sensitivity had begun to disappear from her work.

   Mrs. Grace Latham’s housekeeper Lilac is apparently black, but it is not so stated. The only way you will realize it is from her speech patterns. Here’s a sample, taken from page 19, the first time we meet her in the story. She’s helping to hide a young married woman who has come to Mrs. Latham for some advice:

   By itself I think this is not only fairly innocuous but a pretty good example of a way with words. What the reader gets in these two lines, with no further description, a pretty good picture in his or her mind of who Lilac is and what she may even look like. Is it harmful? Is it demeaning? I’m predisposed to say no, but if you were to press me, I don’t think that it would be too difficult to convince me that any negative stereotyping, wherever or however it occurs, is ever entirely wholesome.

   In any case, however, any racial attitudes that are displayed in the author’s earlier books, even done unconsciously, do not manifest themselves in this one to any degree more visibly than this. Not that I’m saying that the case is closed, but I also think that the backgrounds and settings of mystery novels, taken as a snapshot in time, do more to illustrate the attitudes and opinions of everyday people — for better or worse — than any number of history textbooks I ever studied from when I was in school.

   Grace Latham, who appeared in many of Ms. Ford’s books, is a widow and apparently a Washington socialite of some stature and renown. She has also made her mark as a sleuth of some distinction, even if only peripherally, as in this one, since the bulk of the real detective work is done by Colonel Primrose’s stalwart assistant, Sergeant Buck, and Captain Lamb of the Washington police department, who also appeared in many of Mrs. Latham’s adventures, but not all.

   After retiring from the military, John Primrose and Phineas T. Buck operated in tandem what Grace calls on page 13 a “subterranean private investigation business,” their clients very often being various governmental agencies. Primrose himself does not make an official appearance in this book. He’s quarantined with the measles throughout its duration. Behind the scene, however, he’s actively behind the investigation into the murder that occurs in this case, making numerous suggestions and keeping Grace out of trouble, or trying to.

   Dead is a woman who may have been blackmailing a wealthy industrialist who may have his eye on the White House, the blackmailer therefore being in two ways the lady in the title of the book. One of the various people surrounding the would-be presidential candidate, all of whom were at the same cocktail party, is very likely to have been the killer. Most of them are known to Grace, if not close friends, which many of them are, which makes solving the murder all the more difficult for her.

   Leslie Ford’s prose is sometimes not easy to read, and sometimes the time and location of where her characters are at any one time seem to be taken too much for granted. The difficulty in reading is also due to a “fretful” way of talking that sometimes seems to bunch itself up too much, making it slow going at times to work one’s way through.

   I think the following paragraph, the one quoted at some length below, may go a long way in illustrating this. Grace is with Sergeant Buck, who is trying to reassure her that Susan Kent (the woman being comforted in the quote up above) is not the killer. Grace, by the way, tells the story herself — all but a short Chapter One, which acts like a prologue, which I generally dislike, and once again, yes, I generally dislike it here as well. But to return to page 96, which I was leading up to, before that last digression:

   Don’t get me wrong, though. Leslie Ford seems to have had an excellent insight into people, why they react the way they do; and into marriages that work, and those that don’t. The mystery element — the whodunit part — is also done in a highly acceptable fashion, all wrapped up in a package that in the end is worth unwrapping. To be completely honest, though, for those willing to stop reading a book that seems unsatisfactory before finishing it, there may easily be doubts along the way.

    As far as my comments about the pseudonymous Inigo Jones are concerned, nothing more has been learned other than was stated in my review of his/her second mystery novel, The Albatross Murders.

   Of course, and by now it surely goes without saying, if anything more is learned, odds are you will read about it here first; or if not, I hope it will be no more than second-hand news.

   In the meantime, Bill Pronzini has sent along cover scans for both of the Inigo Jones books, which I’ve combined with the information on the titles to be found in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, and Murder at 3c a Day, by William F. Deeck, and have come up with the following complete crime fiction bibliography for:

INIGO JONES.  Pseudonym.

   * The Clue of the Hungry Corpse (n.) Arcadia House, hc, 1939.   Mystery Novel of the Month #11, digest pb, 1940.   Leading characters: Lt. Blanding and Det. Barry Linden, New York Police Department.   Setting: New York City.

Dust jacket blurb: At 10:07 p.m. Hayden Snell, an eccentric millionaire fond of precious stones almost to the point of madness, is found dead in his overheated study, a Japanese dagger thrust hilt-deep in his heart. Temperature of the room makes it impossible to determine exact time of death, but his telephone receiver was removed at exactly 9:15 p.m.

   Involved in this crime and the complicated network of mystery and adventure that follows are: Katherine Fox, grand-niece of the deceased, the only suspect who cannot provide a satisfactory alibi; Arthur Leader, natural son who hates the entire Snell family; Evander Snell, middle-aged son who mortally fears his sister Miriam; Joseph Rogato, shady private investigator, who tries to have himself arrested for the crime; Weisswasser, Rogato’s mouthpiece and partner in crime; Cokey Flo, Arthur’s mother, who has information implicating Evander Snell in an earlier crime; Monk Saunders, her husband, who holds a powerful threat over Rogato.

   A satisfying detective story particularly recommended to those who appreciate good writing and a complicated puzzle.

Review excerpts: [Will Cuppy, Books.] The author’s writing manner, except for a few backslidings into fancy prose, struck us as a cut above the standardized brittle style now employed by most of the ribald school, and his criminous lingo is inspired. Try the pseudonymous Mr. Jones for amusing wickedness.

[Kay Irwin, New York Times.] There is a little of everything in this story; it is a hodge-podge of excitements, inexpertly handled.
   The unanswerable question is why the architect of such a gingerbread structure chooses to sign himself “Inigo Jones.”

[Saturday Review of Literature.] Couple of clever tricks explained at end, but characters are overdrawn and plot pretty phoney. Not so much.

    * The Albatross Murders (n.) Mystery House, hc, 1941.  The Mystery Novel of the Month #33; digest pb, 1941.   Leading character: Inspector Sebastian Booth.  Setting: New England; Theatre.

Dust jacket blurb: During ten months of the year Shrewsbury was — on the surface — a quiet little New England town; for two months it was something else again.

   For then the summer theatre brought its freight if small-time Broadway talent and amateur aspirants. Their jealousies and conflicts met in a fateful dovetail with conflicts and motives buried deep in Shrewsbury’s past. And so murder struck.

   One died in the sight of five hundred, another died alone. Meanwhile the promise of death murmured everywhere.

   With a fleck of paint off a three-hundred year-old chimney and the aid of twentieth-century science; with the bones of a praying Indian and a bird that flew by night; with an antique silver smelling-salts bottle and a scandal that had its roots in another age and clime — with the aid of these and other things Inspector Sebastian Booth at length solved this dark puzzle of fate’s irony and bloody vengeance.

Review excerpt: [New York Times.]   …Finally Booth comes up with a theory that accounts for everything. The only trouble is that there is very little evidence to support it. It is not a very satisfactory ending, but it is the best that Inigo Jones has to offer.

   Jon Paul Morgan, the author of the article on “Zeno,” from which most of the information in the previous blog entry on the pseudonymous author and convicted killer was taken, has his own blog site where you can read the piece in its entirety.

   This result of a long investigation first appeared in Punch magazine. All of the details — only touched on before — are in the article, along with a number of photos. (Click on the pages to make them readable.)

   It’s a fascinating story, and hats off to Jon Paul Morgan. For doing the research he did and writing it up, he’s earned the credit .

CHARLES J. DUTTON – The Clutching Hand

A. L. Burt; hardcover reprint, no date stated [1929]. First Edition: Dodd Mead & Co., 1928.

   It does no harm, I don’t imagine, to begin with a list of Dutton’s mystery novels. Taken from Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, the one that follows is in chronological order, and does not include British editions.

   Dutton did other writing as well as mysteries, including a biography of Oliver Hazard Perry in 1935, a book that’s apparently still in print, and a book entitled The Samaritans of Molokai: The Lives of Father Damien and Brother Dutton Among the Lepers. (Joseph Dutton worked as a Catholic lay missionary at Kalaupapa, Molokai Island, Hawaii. He arrived on Molokai in 1886, working with Father Damien until Damien’s death in 1889, and remaining on the island until the time of his own death in 1931.)

    Of Harley Manners, I know nothing. Of John Bartley, The Clutching Hand represents the final of nine appearances, and in all honesty, it is not an impressive outing. His companion on this case, a man named Pelt, says of him, taken from pages 2-3:

   This, however, is primary a case (no pun intended) of tell but not show. Here’s another excerpt, this one from page 122, after the case of the clutching hand has begun in earnest. Bartley is talking:

   The murder had occurred — to back up just a little — on a dreary, rain-drenched outpost of an island in Long Island Sound. Van Dike was a famed criminal lawyer with many enemies. After Bartley and Pelt had found the body along in a car, and with Pelt waiting alone for Bartley to return with the authorities, the death apparently (at first) a suicide, Pelt spies a hand reaching into the window to clutch at the dead man’s coat. He gives chase, but loses whoever it was in the mist along the shore.

   It was “a lonely place on a dark rainy night.” The very words are found on page 105.

   It’s hard to say too much about Bartley’s abilities as a detective. He does have the answers at the end of the book, but he does not confide much in Pelt, a man who — and I do hate to say this — is as dumb as a stump. He takes in each day, or so it seems, with the countenance of a new-born babe.

   Clues are not so much found (see the quote above) as, well, here’s an example. On page 123, all seems lost, as far as the investigation is concerned. “So far we knew nothing,” Pelt tells us, the reader, “not the slightest thing of value. And I wondered if we would ever know anything.”

   The chief of police, in attendance at this meeting of minds, pauses and pondering this, says, “I found out one thing which seems odd.” As if it happened to casually occur to him at that very moment, and of course it is exactly what is needed to generate another burst of major barnstorming on the case. Everything seems to happen in slow motion, including a trip by Pelt to a nearby island to visit a gambler’s den there, a trip long in detail, but not much is made of it later on.

   There is a woman named Lura who is involved, and so are some letters. Could it be the same Lura, a woman who also lives on the island? Pelt is greatly puzzled over the possibility that the two could be one and the same. You would think that Lura were as common a woman’s name as Lorraine or Linda.

   The case concludes with a confrontation with the killer, with Bartley outlining the case against him in hypothetical fashion. It is a solid case, an iron-clad one, but Pelt is amazed, absolutely stunned when he/she in fact really turns out to be the killer. From page 287, Pelt says to the reader:

   Or perhaps this was meant to be the double-switcheroo of an ending, but no, not so. Bartley was no Ellery Queen, and Pelt is no Watson.

INIGO JONES – The Albatross Murders

The Mystery Novel of the Month #33; digest-sized paperback reprint, 1941. Hardcover First Edition: Mystery House, 1941.

    Beginning with what’s known so far about the author, here’s a quote from Bill Deeck’s long-awaited reference book on lending library mystery publishers, Murder at 3 Cents a Day (Battered Silicon Dispatch Box):

   Some detective work is therefore in order. The actual title of the book appears to be 50 Best American Short Stories 1915-1939, and one can find a complete list of the contents on the Internet, including all fifty authors.

   This narrows it down, but not enough, unless authors like Erskine Caldwell, J. P. Marquand, and Dorothy Parker can be eliminated, and they probably can. But there are enough unfamiliar names there (Robert Whitehand, I. V. Morris, Lovell Thompson and a host of similar others) that at the moment, I cannot tell you that I have proceeded any further than this.

    While I am presuming that the first name Inigo denotes someone of the masculine gender (about which see below), it cannot obviously be presumed that the person behind the pseudonym is equally masculine.

    If by chance it is a clue to you (but not to me) that there are two Inigo Jones’s listed online at the wikipedia website, let me know. The first is considered the first significant English architect (1573-1652), while the second is a descendant of the first, one Inigo Owen Jones (1872-1954), who is noted as having been a well-known meteorologist and long-range weather forecaster.

    More clues may arise from the settings of Inigo Jones, the detective story author. The Albatross Murders takes place in Shrewsbury, a small New England town, the mystery centering around the troupe of actors plying their trade in a two-months-long summer theatre. (No state is named; only New England. While no actual state name is mentioned, it had the distinct feel of Connecticut or western Massachusetts to me.) Doing the investigatory honors is Inspector Sebastian Booth.

    Jones’s earlier book, The Clue of the Hungry Corpse (Arcadia House, hc, 1939; Mystery Novel of the Month #11, digest pb, 1940), takes place in New York City, and the detectives of record in that book were Lieutenant Blanding and Headquarters Detective Barry Linden, thanks again to Bill Deeck’s book. Which I admit doesn’t give us a lot more to go on, except to suggest that the author was familiar with both small town and big city American life, New England and New York City style. (I’d have eliminated Erskine Caldwell on this basis, if I hadn’t already.)

    So who Inigo Jones was is a mystery as yet unsolved. There’s also, I go on to say, at last, an equally interesting case to be solved in The Albatross Murders as well – that of an actor being shot to death on stage with a gun loaded only with blanks, and in full sight of 500 people. More? It is later discovered that the bullet is not in the body, nor is there an exit wound.

   There is a lot of back stage rivalry between the players – hardly unexpected, as such rivalries always seem to exist in such affairs – and in terms of both quantity and quality, there is certainly more than enough, and they are substantial enough, to keep the story going purely on the behind-the-scenes business alone. But adding some additional momentum to the tale, the local townspeople have their own secrets as well, and the events that occur after uncovering them turn especially nasty very quickly. The double combo gives Inspector Booth about as much as he can handle, or wants to.

   There was a certain amount of crudity, I thought, in the detective’s initial approach. Chapter IV is twelve pages long and consists of nothing more (or less) than a re-creation of the murder, with all of the players in their places, and the body of the victim still lying uncovered on the floor.

    But (and again, if this is a clue to the person behind the pen name, let me know) the author knows his way around backstage, and his detective character is no mean slouch at reasoning things through. Let me quote one paragraph from page 43, to allow you to see, I believe, for yourself:

    Yes, yes, I know. Some of you are yawning already, and so was I for a while, but by page 108 the dialogue between the characters had become almost lyrical, the repartee flowing both easily and wittily, with Booth always firmly centered at the focal point. The method of the murder is clever enough, although highly unlikely, and with no perhaps about it. But one could say that of the Queen effort commented on a short while ago, couldn’t one?

    Other than that, there’s really no comparison. In the final analysis, Jones’s effort comes up far short in comparison with that previously reviewed and totally superb, multi-faceted Queenian extravaganza. But even though The Albatross Murders is a minor league effort, it definitely has its pluses as well as minuses, making totally valid the final note I wrote myself – I always write comments to myself while reading – for this is what I said, somewhat in surprise, I have to admit, after the book and I got off to such a rough start together: “Not bad after all.”

   And please take that statement for all that it’s worth. You can take it to the bank, deposit it, and count on it.

   As part of the ongoing, online project to supplement Bill Deeck’s reference work about lending-library mysteries, Murder at 3c a Day, I’ve just uploaded scans of the covers of those that Hillman-Curl published between 1936 and 1937. Authors included in this grouping include Bram Stoker, Steve Fisher, E. R. Punshon, Sydney Horler and others.

   You may also be interested in reading Hillman-Curl’s “Bill of Rights for Detective Story Readers,” in which they set out the standards they intended their new line of “Clue Club” mysteries to live up to.

   I recently reread Westlake’s The Hot Rock for the first time in ages and was struck by the fact that Grofield makes an appearance. One of the members of Dortmunder’s crew, Alan Greenwood, is forced to change his last name after he’s arrested. We learn in the book’s penultimate chapter that he’s now Alan Grofield.

    Grofield had already been established in the Parker series as well as his own books at this point. So is this a belated origin story, as they say in the comics field?

[UPDATE]  Later the same evening. I don’t know anything more about Greenwood / Grofield than I did earlier today, but I did some surfing and came up with the following somewhat relevant information. First of all, first editions of The Hot Rock in dust jacket (1970) are starting to get pricey. You can pick up Fair ex-library copies for $15, but be prepared to spend in the low three-figure range for one in VG condition.

Even copies of the first printing Pocket paperback are hard to find, although not expensive. The cover image below is taken from a later Canadian printing.

There was a movie made of the book, and do you know, I had completely forgotten that it was Robert Redford who played Dortmunder. His brother-in-law, Andrew Kelp, is played by George Segal in the 1972 movie. Others in the gang are Ron Liebman as Stan Murch, and Paul Sand as Alan Greenberg. The image below was taken from the laserdisc version.

As for Paul Sand, it was surprising difficult to find a photo of him. The one below came from the classic extravaganza TV series, Supertrain (1979). Too bad it’s a few years too late to be useful, but so far, it’s the best I have.

   I’m still wet between behind the ears when it comes to running a blog. A tight ship here, it isn’t. I don’t know what to do about comments, for example. People leave interesting comments, a discussion ensues, and how do I point it out to people who’ve read the post originally and haven’t gone back to look again?

   Posts like this one, I suppose. Let me mention a few earlier posts that people have left comments on that might be worth your going back and taking another look.

   The post that seems to have struck a chord with the largest number of people stopping by is the obituary I did for Philip Craig. This was nearly a month ago, and that particular piece has generated nearly 10% of the traffic here on the blog ever since, and by far the largest number of comments have been left there than for any other post. Readers and fans of Philip Craig’s work seem to have been as stunned when they learned of his death as I was. They’ve loved his books and characters deeply, and by extension, the author himself. Statements of condolences to Phil’s family predominate here.

   More recently, Peter Rozovsky and I had a genial discussion (and partial disagreement) of the merits of Grofield, the character who sometimes teams up with Parker in Donald Westlake’s “Richard Stark” books, and who sometimes works along. Our conversation follows my review of Pity Him Afterwards, a stand-alone crime novel that Westlake wrote under his own name.

   A recent review of a western novel that L. P. Holmes wrote as Matt Stuart, Edge of the Desert, produced an inquiry that caused me to do some investigating into some of the other westerns that Holmes wrote. Even though he died in 1988, Holmes’s books still come out at a rate of about one a year.

   Juri Nummelin’s question about George Marton in a post about the latter’s death produced a couple of fascinating followup full-fledged blog entries about Zeno, and the man behind the pseudonym. I hope you didn’t miss them. Do a blog search for Zeno in the box on the right, and you’ll find both of them.

   In fact, if you go to Google and type in [ zeno “play dirty” ], the first of the two M*F posts will appear as #1 of about 180 results. At least it does when I do it, but from what I know of Google’s searching algorithms, your results may vary.

   Sometimes, strangely enough, blog entries generate a ton of traffic but hardly anything in the way of comments. The list of Most Reprinted Authors and Stories in Anthologies was one, to pick a fine example. The day after that was posted was the busiest one ever, with the possible exception of the day the news of Donald Hamilton’s death was confirmed.

   And yet only one comment has been left so far — thanks, Bill! — or two, if you count my reply. Go figure, as some mad mathematician was once heard to say.

   Uploaded this morning was Part 15 of Allen J. Hubin’s Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV. Once again most of the data in this installment consists of identifying authors who have entries in the online Contemporary Authors, not previously noted.

   Some of the other information — deaths, added settings, series characters and so on — has already appeared here on the Mystery*File blog, but hardly all. Even though Al has limited the coverage of CFIV to the year 2000 and before, additions and corrections continue to come streaming in.

   As for me, I’m waaaay behind on everything I have in mind to do for this blog. Whatever manages to show up here comes to only maybe 10% of what I’d like to do, if only I could.

   And to think that when I started I didn’t think that I had anything to say. Mostly what I had in mind was to have a place where the stories behind the data in CFIV could be told. That’s still its primary function, and if you’re not taking a look at the Addenda, you’re missing out on the basic reason that I revived M*F once again, this time in the blog format. (First time viewers should go to the main page first. That’s where you’ll see more of what the final product is intended to look like, with annotations, links and lots of cover images.)

J. A. S. McCOMBIE – Mandate for Murder

Manor 15349; paperback original, 1978.

   I’m a sucker for books by obscure, one-shot mystery writers, and here’s one that qualifies on both counts. The copy of this book that I purchased off ABE was the only one that was available for sale at the time, and at the moment, a couple of months later, there haven’t been any others that have turned up for sale. Nor I can find a record of any other books written by Mr. McCombie, mystery fiction or not.

   Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV supplies some information: The initials stand for John Alexander Somerville, and he was born in 1925, but that’s it. A search on Google suggested that McCombie was involved with the movie business, however, and so it was off to the Internet Movie Data Base.

   Pay dirt. Sometimes known as J. A. S. McCrombie, he was the screenwriter or wrote the story for:

   Coincidentally, or not, all three films were directed by Virginia L. Stone, who was also the co-producer, along with McCombie. (On the other hand, Virginia Stone was married to long-time director Andrew L. Stone, about whom more might be said at some later date.)

   In any case, I should have known that McCombie was involved with the movies or television, just from reading the book he wrote. Not that I’ve ever watched the current television smash hit 24, but I thought to myself, and more than once, that the person who came up with some of the hard action twists in Mandate for Murder really ought to be writing for more money than Manor Books ever paid him.

   The book’s set mostly in Hong Kong and the area surrounding. When a wealthy sophisticated terrorist kidnaps the consular general, the nephew of the US Secretary of State and the husband of a Senator’s daughter (and the goddaughter of the President), what he hopes to gain is the leverage to free a cohort from a northern California prison.

   Which may be all you need to know. There is torture, there are multiple deaths, some of them occurring surprisingly early, and there is a lot of local color. The writing, although sometimes very sloppy, is vivid and cinematic (not surprisingly) and moderately compelling. The author also seems to know airplanes and other flying craft, of which there are several that are flown and/or blown up during the course of this book. (No animals were harmed, however, as I recall.)

   Unfortunately, which I believe is the correct word, the big surprise that McCombie has in store for the reader is one which I had anticipated long before. When the smaller twists start accumulating too quickly, one of the side effects that can happen is that the reader starts thinking too much about the larger picture and what the author may have up his (or her) sleeve.

   Or in other words, from a structural point of view, unless the author is adroit and nimble-fingered enough at the keyboard, too many twists can be counter-effective, since it can easily leave the big, would-be jolt naked and exposed and not so terribly difficult to smoke out in advance.

   And so it is in this case.

[UPDATE] 06-03-07. There are now four copies listed on ABE, in case you might be interested, and I did watch the final four weeks of 24 in last season’s series.