Tue 17 Aug 2010
Review: HERBERT FLOWERDEW – The Villa Mystery.
Posted by Steve under Crime Fiction IV , Pulp Fiction , Reviews[8] Comments
HERBERT FLOWERDEW – The Villa Mystery. Brentano’s, US, hardcover, 1912. First published in the UK: Stanley Paul, 1912. Serialized in The Cavalier, May 24 through June 21 1913. Also available online here and in various POD editions.
Before I discovered this book online and in various Print on Demand editions, I saw the title and author in this blog’s recent checklist of “Serials from Argosy Published As Books†and found a copy of the Brentano’s hardcover edition without too much difficulty. For less than twenty dollars in fact, which is one heck of a lot cheaper than finding a complete set of the five issues of The Cavalier which it appeared in.
Of course, it does me no good to brag about this, not when you can read it online for free.
But should you? Can an obscure mystery or detective novel written in 1912 be worth the time and effort? My answer’s yes, given certain conditions, and I’m about to tell you why.
The story’s definitely an old-fashioned one – how could it not be? – and if you have an allergy to old-fashioned stories, you might as well stop reading this review right now. It begins with a young girl, totally destitute, making her way to a former friend of her dead father, a wealthy man who has refused to repay a loan.
But now that she has found the IOU, which had gone missing, she hopes to persuade him to repay his debt — but he refuses to listen to her, requiring her to return in the morning. He has no time to listen to her now. She leaves, but then returns to watch through the window of the study where she saw him earlier before entering once again, leaving the IOU and making off with a suitcase of money she has decided is rightfully hers.
In making her way back to the train station, however, she is accosted by one man and rescued by another. In the way that the world worked back in 1912, the latter is the stepson of the man whose debt to Elsa Armandy has been repaid in such an unorthodox fashion.
In another of the ways that the world worked back in 1912, Nehemiah Grayle is soon found dead, possibly a suicide (or so the butler claims) but more probably not. Compounding Esmond Hare’s deepening dilemma, for he believes the girl’s story (and she is most attractive) is that to remove her from suspicion means incriminating his own mother, now estranged from the dead man.
There is a local detective in charge of the case, but it is on Hare’s shoulders that solving the crime falls. But this is a story of romance as much as it is one of detective work, with much missing of connections as the characters move here and there and do not stay where they are supposed to stay, mostly because of revelations and stories not quite believed or not told in timely enough fashion.
And all the while staying out of the hands of the police, especially Elsa, but Esmond also, who fears he may say and reveal too much if he is questioned further.
Delicious, I say. They don’t write stories like this very much any more. But what’s even better is that there really are some even more delightful twists and turns in the detective side of things, including a final explanation which is really quite clever, almost as clever as one found in the best of the Golden Age of Detective stories.
It’s just a little awkward in the telling, I have to confess, and there are some even clumsier aspects of the clues and what the characters make of them earlier on, in their naively old-fashioned way, so it’s with these caveats that I do recommend you read this one.
Bio-Bibliographic Notes: There are 16 books listed for the author in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, but nine of them are indicated with a hyphen as being only marginally criminous.
Herbert Flowerdew died in 1917 at the age of only 51. If he’d lived longer, perhaps he’d have taken this book as a stepping stone to a more significant mystery writing career, but that alas, we’ll never know.
August 18th, 2010 at 9:38 am
I’ll have to look this up. While they may not be classics and probably aren’t fair play in the sense we mean, many mysteries from this period have some appeal.
As you say there is often much you have to forgive with books from this period, but they have a charm and grace of their own and can still entertain.
August 18th, 2010 at 10:15 am
Just ran across this review of a contemporary of Flowerdew’s (Headon Hill) and thought this line might apply:
“He deserves the highest admiration for the consistent way in which he has avoided the slightest suspicion of probability.”
And that’s a positive review the publisher included! Can you imagine praising a writer today for avoiding “… the slightest suspicion of probability?”
Times really have changed.
August 18th, 2010 at 10:36 am
Sorry, one more, once again Headon Hill. These are the ‘good’ reviews the publisher chose to try and sell the book!
“STAGE.–Not even the late Guy Boothby imagined anything more magnificently preposterous than the motive of Mr. Headon Hill’s “Millions of Mischief.”
August 18th, 2010 at 10:50 am
Thanks for providing my pre-breakfast laugh of the day!
I’ve never read anything by Headon Hill, but now I think I must.
— Steve
August 18th, 2010 at 11:18 am
Steve
The quotes were from THE TRAITOR’S WOOING by Headon Hill (available free on line) in which an evil Marahrajah schemes to have a young Englishwoman fall in love with an Englishman who will carry her away to India on the yacht THE COBRA where the Marahrajah can have his ‘way’ with her.
Preposterous is only the beginning. Here’s an exchange between the heroine’s able best friend (the Eve Arden role) and a young ally as her boyfriend’s Naval vessel the SNIPE closes on the fleeing COBRA. Leslie Chermside is speaking:
“No, I should endeavour to hit upon some plan for damaging the engines. Those of a turbine steamer like this are a very delicate piece of mechanism, and a comparatively trifling injury, not necessarily entailing great violence, would do the trick. Ever such a little delay for repairs would enable the Snipe to catch up if they have allowed her to come as close as you describe.”
“Then the sooner I set to work the better,” said Nettle, knitting her brows, as the germ of an inspiration was born. “Good-bye, Mr. Chermside, and keep your pecker up. Miss
Maynard doesn’t know the hobble we’re in—still thinks we’re on the point of being rescued.”
Here the villainous Captain of the COBRA gets his comeuppance from Miss Nettle Jimson.
“That is the hole you have dug for yourself to tumble into,” returned Miss Nettle Jimpson sweetly. “You thought you were being funny at my expense in allowing the torpedo-boat to nearly catch you, but you overdid your joke, Captain Brant. That ship is the Snipe, with my young man as acting gunner. You let her come so close that we were blowing kisses to each other half an hour ago. When my Ned steps on to your deck five minutes hence he’ll ask for me, if he’s still the affectionate youth I’ve educated him into. And you won’t be able to gammon him with any yarn about my having jumped overboard. He knows jolly well I’m not built that way.”
Brant looked up at her, mouthing and gibbering; then he spat on the deck, and, turning away without a word, flung his Derringer over the rail into the sea.
And the helpless Cobra, her poison-fangs drawn, lay on the swell like a wilted weed while the Snipe, vomiting black fury from her three funnels, swooped down.’
Love that mixed metaphor.
They don’t write ’em like this anymore — they wouldn’t dare! Discovering this one has made my day — and I promise it is real, not a MONTY PYTHON sketch or one of those sixties films like THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES with Terry Thomas. Not that I wouldn’t kill to hear TT deliver some of these lines.
The Flowerdew sounds a good deal better, but it couldn’t possibly be this much fun. This book could be an entire chapter of GUN IN CHEEK.
And in the immortal words of Miss Nettle Jimson, “keep your pecker up!”
August 18th, 2010 at 4:33 pm
I wonder what she meant by that!
But lest anyone think that Flowerdew’s prose is anything like Headon Hill’s, let me reassure them that it is not — if reassure is the right word to use. They may have been contemporaries, but stylistically they were miles if not leagues apart.
While reading THE VILLA MYSTERY both Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Dickson Carr came to mind, and for decidedly difference reasons — nor am I saying that Flowerdew is comparable to either of those two in storytelling ability.
As long as we’re quoting, and it’s OK since the book is in the Public Domain, here at random is a long passage from the end of Chapter VII (pages 87-87), just before Elsa and Esmond count up the money that she’s absconded with:
Elsa’s lips tightened.
“Is prison worse than the workhouse?” she asked, and again Hare left the question unanswered.
“For the moment you are safe,” he said, “but what are the chances of your remaining so? Grayle’s chauffeur knows that you took the bag. He knows that you entered the train. If they make inquiries about the line, they will almost certainly discover that you got out at Birling. Already they will be on the look-out for you there, blocking your chance of escape from here. If the man who carried your bag cares to speak — he might be tempted by the chance of a reward — well! that brings the pursuit very near home, especially if our friend of the velvet coat recognised me. Then there is the man of the motor-car. He knows that you are here. Have you no idea who he can be?”
Elsa shook her head.
“I could only think of Mr, Grayle. It was not unlike him, so far as I could tell. But if it was Mr. Grayle, why has he gone away without the bag — without even demanding it? Do you think — that he has gone to fetch the police?”
A sudden panic showed itself in her eyes as the fear suggested itself, and Esmond was glad that he could reassure her honestly.
“He would have done that last night instead of waiting to make a burglarious entry when he thought we were asleep. I did not get a clear view of the man, but I do not think it was Mr. Grayle. Whoever it was, his visit shows that you have been traced, and makes the chances of your keeping the money mote than ever remote. But before we discuss it any more, do you not think it is time that we saw what the bag actually contains? It might help us to solve the mystery of our burglar’s visit.”
August 18th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
I didn’t mean to infer that Flowerdew was in Hill’s class (or lack of it). Just wanted to share the delights of Headon Hill as I just discovered them in relation to a contemporary.
Truthfully, for every Headon Hill there were plenty of good writers from that period writing in the genre, but sadly, or happily, there are plenty of Headon Hill’s too.
Flowerdew sounds to be one of the better ones and I’ll check this out.
As for what the young lady meant by that line, the mind boggles. I assume it had a different meaning than the one that occurs to most of us (in context either to spirits or more likely courage), but I can’t say I’ve ever encountered it in quite this context. The only other meaning of the term I had encountered was an Australian one referring to a supply of food and other necessities carried by a traveler, and that makes no sense here.
One more example of the vagaries of American and British English. I haven’t been this shocked since an English girl asked me to knock her up sometime. Boy was I disappointed to find out what ‘that’ meant.
August 19th, 2010 at 7:15 am
Steve,
Thank you for a very interesting review!
This author is completely new to me.