Brown Study: Correcting Some of the Biographical Details on Fredric Brown

I looked into the biographical information on Fredric Brown over the weekend and found a lot of it is wrong.  So I thought I would go over some of the issues here.  It strikes me that "Brownie," to use his high school nickname (though in spite of his surname he was blond), was one of the most important mid-century noirists or hard-boiled writers.  Much of his work is back in print again, but he still seems not to get quite the credit that he should in my view (and those in his coterie of devotees, one of whom is Lawrence Block).  

The hard-boiled triumvirate of Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald seems, after having been set for a half-century or more, something inviolable, while in noir Highsmith, Goodis and Thompson have been more the thing with genre critics.  Woolrich too, though some critics like Julian Symons hated Cornell's work.  Symons doesn't even deign to mention Brown in his idiosyncratic but once very influential survey Bloody Murder, even in the last edition, from 1992, after some of Brown's books had been reprinted.  

Fredric Brown may be too plot-driven for critics to take seriously and perhaps he has too many alcoholic loser protagonists for mass appeal.  Raymond Chandler thought the hard-boiled fiction which he himself wrote was more "realistic" than the genteel English and American variety, but the truth is hard-boiled fiction is like a lot of genre wish-fulfillment fiction; it's just promulgating a different sort of fantasy.  Instead of poisoned tea and scones at the vicarage, it's slugs and shootouts in the back alleys; but the latter is, if anything, more far removed from the lives of a lot of average middle-class mystery readers.  Certainly it is from mine.  I've sipped tea in polite company, though not with vicars, but the only hoodlum I ever "met," to my knowledge, was once when I was serving jury duty. 

Just another nice middle-class kid?  Brown's Senior Class photo (Class of '25)

I think people--more often men--who read hard-boiled fiction identify with the tough-guy protagonists.  Brown and for that matter Woolrich bros are a little too neurotic for mass appeal.  Even a lot of the noir anti-heroes are often tough guys.  They may be twisted murderers, sure, but they impose their will on others, at least for a time. (Often they meet their fatal matches in those mystic dames known as femme fatales.)  

Brown's and Woolrich's men more often seem to be scared losers desperately on the run, at least in my experience.  These authors identified with victims, Highsmith and Thompson with victimizers.  At least that's the theory running through my head at the moment.  

We all know about the tough life, to some extent self-imposed, that Woolrich had, but what about our Brownie?  Like Woolrich, who was less than three years his elder, Brown was an only child of a marriage from around the turn of the century.  He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, two days before Halloween in 1906, meaning tha,t as I write this, his 118th birthday is fewer than 24 hours away.  If he were alive today, he would be the world's oldest person, beating out Tomiko Itooka of Japan, a mere child of 116.  

A conveniently located biographical page for Brown at the Ohio Center for the Book--his wikipedia page is rather inadequate--obviously draws on Jack Saybrook's interesting thirty-year-old critical study of the author, but a lot of the biographical information in it from 1993 simply is wrong.  

According to this bio Brown's parents were Karl Lewis Brown, a newspaperman, and Emma Amelia Graham; and he grew up in Cincinnati.  His mother died in 1920, when he was 14, and his father died the next year when he was 15.  Brown supposedly resided with a family friend until he graduated from high school in 1922 at the age of 15.  

He had an uncle in Oxford, Ohio who helped him out as his guardian and he worked until 1924 as an office boy in a "machine tool jobbing firm" until 1924.  Supposedly in 1927 he attended single semesters at Hanover College in Indiana and the University of Cincinnati.  

In 1929 he married Helen Ruth Brown, a woman to whom he may have been distantly related.  This ostensibly after, lonelyhearts like, only ever having corresponded with her and seen her likeness in a photo.  

In 1930 the newlywed couple moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Brown worked as a proofreader and typesetter for the Milwaukee Journal.  It would be close to the end of the decade before he started placing stories in the pulps, leading to an explosion of productivity in the Forties and Fifties, though Brown, in poor health and alcoholic, would essentially be played out by the mid-Sixties.  He lived on until 1972, dying at the age of 65.  He had divorced married again, in the Forties after the war, and for his health went to live with his second wife in the Southwest, in New Mexico and later Arizona.  

Much of the early life detail is, however, as I have stated, wrong in detail.  If people relied on written material from Brown for this information, he was not, for whatever reason, being truthful.  

One strange thing is an omission.  Fredric Brown actually had quite a prominent grandfather, Waldo Franklin Brown, who died at the age of 75 in 1906, the year after Brownie was born.  It seems odd that he never would have mentioned Waldo.  Like his grandson, Waldo was even a newspaper man, a nationally known progressive agriculturist who edited the farm pages of the Cincinnati Enquirer and Gazette and frequently published advisory articles under the name "Johnny Plowboy."  Up to Brownie's himself Waldo was easily the most famous and distinguished person in the Brown family.

On his father's side Frederic Brown was descended from New England stock going back to Massachusetts into the 1700s, while on his mother's side he was descended from the Grahams: Presbyterians, surely Scots-Irish, going back to Pennsylvania.  

His mother Emma's grandfather was Reverend Jacob Graham, minister of the gospel at Graham's Chapel in Lodi, a tiny village in rural Ohio.  No relation to the late Reverend Billy Graham of North Carolina as fas I know, though the lines probably intersect somewhere back in Scotland if you go back far enough.  

Great-Grandfather Graham

Fred (let's go to his nick as an adult) apparently later claimed his father was an atheist, as he was himself.  His mother's Graham ancestors would not have been happy with that, nor so would his father's Brown ancestors.  

Grandpa Waldo was a Presbyterian Church elder and Sunday-school superintendent for two decades.  One of Waldo's brothers was a Presbyterian minister.  (I'm guessing the Browns were originally English Puritans who made the switch as Puritanism and Congregationalism attenuated in its stern righteousness in the 18th century.)  

Fred's two sons with his first wife would be baptized within the Presbyterian Church, despite their father's atheism. Maybe his wife insisted.  Fred stated that he himself was made to attend church in Cincinnati between the ages of 9 to 14 (1915 to 1920).  He called those years the "most mixed-up period of my life." 

The Brown house in Newport, Kentucky

This was probably Brownie's bedroom.  The furnishings seems strangely appropriate.

For a few years years the Browns lived across the Ohio River in the small city of Newport, Kentucky (pop. about 30,000) in a narrow two story brick row house on Linden Avenue.  They were living there when the census was taken in 1910, when Fred was a small child, along with Emma's widowed mother.  Fred's father Karl's occupation was listed as "correspondence clerk."  He was not a newspaperman.

Why did the family move from Cincinnati across the river to Newport in adjacent state?  Well, possibly because Karl landed in hot water in Cincy.  In 1908, when he was a salesman for Gray & Co., a maker of an electroplating apparatus, he was arrested on a warrant sworn by visiting Mexican businessman Benjamin Arboleda, who charged him with obtaining from him a draft for nearly $420 (about $14,000 today) on false pretenses.  

I do not know the outcome of this case, but in 1911 Karl was back in Cincinnati and in court again where he testified in a fraud case concerning vacuum cleaner makers R. Armstrong and Company, for whom he worked as bookkeeper.  I'm sensing these firms were somewhat on the shady side.  

The Brown house in Cincinnati

Yet Karl seemed to manage despite his brushes with the law, for in 1920 the Browns were still living in Cincinnati, residing in an old but attractive Italianate brick house on Chase street.  Karl was now the manager of the R. Armstrong Manufacturing Company, which now was selling machine tools.  

The chronology of events from Fred's life in the Twenties is, to be blunt, screwed-up.  Let's get started on this.  

Fred's mother Emma did not die in 1920, she died in 1923 (apparently from cancer), while his father did not die in 1921, but five years later in 1926.  These are still untimely deaths, to be sure, at ages 50 and 53 respectively, but why did Fred move the dates up, if that is what he did, to make himself an orphan at age 15?  He actually became an orphan at nearly 20 (still terrible).  His mother died when he was 17.  He says her death caused him to lose his faith in God for good. 

Graham's Chapel

It was Fred's Grandmother Graham who died in 1920, at age 72.  Granted, to lose his whole immediate family--his grandmother, mother and father--at such a young age in the space of six years would have been devastating to most people.  

The dates of Fred's graduation from high school are also wrong.  He did not graduate from high school at the age of 15 in 1922, he graduated three years later, like a normal person, when he was 18.  Nor was he an orphan when he graduated, as his father did not pass away until the next year.  Again, did Fred lie about this, and if so why, to make himself seem like a prodigy?  Or has this just been an error by researchers?  

The "machine tool jobbing firm" with which Fred was employed as an office boy would have been the business his father managed in the Twenties, R. Armstrong Manufacturing Company.  He later wrote a novel drawing on these work experiences: The Office, published in 1958, the same year Cornell Woolrich published his straight novel Hotel Room, which drew on his own life.

The supportive Oxford, Ohio uncle was Linn Waldo Brown, his father's slightly younger brother, for whom Fred would name his younger son in 1932.  (His elder son was named James Ross Brown, Ross being the middle name of his father-in-law; see below.)  

It was Linn who was a newspaperman.  After having retired as a grocer, he became Oxford correspondent for the Hamilton Ohio Chronicle.  Linn was also Oxford's public health officer.  He too would die an untimely death, from a sudden heart attack at age 62 in 1937.  

Oxford was then a small town of some 2000 people about thirty miles north of Cincinnati.  It was where Fred's Grandfather Waldo died and was buried and where his father Karl was buried, even though Karl's wife Emma was interred, along with her mother, in Cincinnati.  The Browns were lauded as one of "Oxford's oldest pioneer families."

Langstroth Cottage, where Fred's Aunt Florence was discovered bolt upright in her chair, dead

Karl and Linn had four older half-sisters: Alice, Winona, Florence and Berta.  Fred would have known all his Brown aunts, who passed away between 1929 and 1944.  His Aunt Florence, who died in 1929 at age 65.  For many years she had charge of Langstroth Cottage at the Western College for Women in Oxford, a national historical landmark where famed beekeeper L. L. Langstroth, a friend of the Browns, lived for three decades.  Her lifeless body was discovered bolt upright in a chair in her bedroom by a history professor who had gone to check on her.  There's a good macabre story for the Fredric Brown reader.

Another concerns another one of Karl's and Linn's half-sisters, Berta, who married Oxford antique dealer Alvin Gaston.  After she died in 1934 at the age of 68, Alvin, six months later in 1935, said to be deeply despondent over the loss of his wife, committed suicide by slashing his own wrists and throat. Or so the county coroner concluded. (You can't read mysteries without being suspicious of this succession of deaths.)  

It really is something out of a Fredric Brown novel, with some notable parallels to The Screaming Mimi, recently reviewed here (antiques, razor death).  Interestingly, Alvin was said to have owned "one of the largest and finest collections of antiques in the state," much of which was sold at auction, the Gastons having had no children.  Alvin's hoard of more than 1000 Native American relics, including arrowheads and axes, went to his nephew Victor J. Smith, a prominent geologist at Sul Ross Normal College at Alpine, Texas.  

One of the Armstrong 
Manufacturing Company's
amazing products, a home
vacuum cleaner for only $6
($199.99 today)

Was their incompatibility and conflict between Fredric Brown's parents?  There does seem to be a dichotomy between the pious Presbyterian backgrounds of the Browns and Grahams and Karl's trips to court to deal with business fraud accusations.  Clearly, Karl was not an "honest farmer" like his father.  He seems more like one those guys you used to see on late night TV ads hawking miracle inventions and get-rich quick schemes (now seen on Youtube and in certain presidential campaigns).  

Then there's the matter of Fred's first wife, Helen.  They weren't what I would call distantly related.  Rather they were, Poeish-like, second cousins.  Helen's father Thane Ross Brown was Karl Lewis Brown's first cousin.  

It seems inconceivable that the couple had never met before their marriage.  When they moved to Milwaukee after the marriage, they lived in 1930 with Helen's family at their attractive gabled, shingled Victorian home.  Thane was a structural works civil engineer, as was his son, Helen's brother, who worked for the Civilian Conservation corps during the Depression.  

Once accounts get into the 1930s things seem to get on surer ground.  But I thought I'd do my bit to straighten out the earlier years.  One thing I haven't found, what the "W" in his name stood for.  Was it just possibly Waldo?  Maybe someone else already discovered that.  

Noir Weekend Benders I--Scream Queen: The Screaming Mimi (1949), Fredric Brown

"It isn't a nice story.  It's got murder in it, and women and liquor and gambling and even prevarication."

--The Screaming Mimi

Eleven years ago I blogged a short review of my favorite Fredric Brown crime novel The Far Cry.  It remains such to me (and, indeed, one of my favorite crime novels generally), but, as some commenters at the time pointed out, other "Brownies" have their own favorites.  A lot of people plunk for The Screaming Mimi (1949), Brown's fifth crime novel, which followed by a couple of years his Edgar-award winning debut The Fabulous Clipjoint.  Part of its prominence in the Brown canon may be due to its having been filmed twice, in 1958 in the United States as Screaming Mimi and a dozen year later in Italy as the classic early giallo flick Lucello dalle piume di cristallo, aka The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.  

Relatively few of Brown's crime novels have been filmed, it seems, Knock Three-One-Two and His Name Was Death being the others, both French films.  (Knock also appeared as an hour long episode of the American television anthology series Thriller.)  So Mimi stands out in that respect.  

I think it also helps that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a really fine horror-thriller film, although it actually doesn't credit Brown in any way, a most unjust omission because if you have watched the film and read the book, the debt to Brown is obvious.  But more on this later, let's get the book, which is certainly an impressive piece of work in its own right.  

The book was clearly a big hit at the mid-century; I've seen ad copy claiming that it sold two million copies and was the "best-selling shock novel of all time," with five million readers.  It's easy to see why it would have been popular.  

It's "hard-boiled, but not offensively so," as Dorothy B. Hughes put it, with definitely salacious elements, but it's very nicely plotted so as to appeal to the puzzle fans.  Like so many of Brown's books it is narrated by an alcoholic: Bill Sweeney, an ace Chicago newspaper reporter and royal flush drunk, or a "down and out lush" as the back cover of my Carroll and Graf edition of the novel calls him.  

To be fair the book tells us insistently "Sweeney wasn't an alcoholic," that he just needs to have binges every so often.  Likely referencing Charles T. Jackson's bestselling novel The Lost Weekend (1944) and the Oscar-winning film made from it in 1945, the book assures us defensively: "There's that type of drinker [the periodic binger], too, although of late the alcoholics have been getting most of the ink."

Well, maybe so.  Nevertheless, I always feel like, when it comes to Brown's characters--and perhaps Brown himself--that this is just prevarication.  If, like Sweeney, you're waking up on a park bench, after a blackout binge, utterly broke and disgustingly disheveled and talking to God (actually another drunk named Godfrey), you're in pretty damn bad shape.  

Don't listen to me, listen to the Guardian, Gen Z!  If I have Gen Z readers.  

Sweeney even contemplates rolling a harmless passing fairy on the sidewalk for the cash in his wallet.  (Actually I'd better be careful with my slang here because while I mean robbing the word now can refer to, um, f---ing as well, and Sweeney most certainly does not want to dally sexually with a fairy princess of the queerer sort.) 

Here's Sweeney's thought process on this matter:

Someone was coming toward him on the sidewalk.  A pretty boy in a bright checked sport jacket.  Sweeney's fists clenched.  What would be his chances if he slugged the fairy, grabbed his wallet and ran into the alley?  But he hadn't ever done that before and his reactions were too slow.  Much too slow.  The fairy, edging to the outside of the sidewalk, was past him before Sweeney could make up his mind.  

How often in hard-boiled novels does the "hero"  contemplate assaulting and robbing hovering fairies, something admittedly that happened all too often in real life?  I don't even think the pretty boy in the loud plaid jacket actually was on the sexual make.  Our hero has really hit the skids morally.  

Judging by what Sweeney looks and must smell like after his binge, I don't believe any self-respecting queer--or maybe even a self-loathing one--would willingly get amorously close to this guy.  

This is an extended aside, but queer references in Brown's books are interesting and even suggestive, at least to me.  I'll leave aside the sentence, "Sweeney dragged deeply at the fag," cause it's referring, at least literally, to a cigarette, but a few pages later Sweeney is hitting up (threateningly) Goetz, a buddy (straight), for money.  He strips to take a badly needed bath at his bud's place and, naked, tells him: "Don't call copper, now, Goetz.  With me dressed this way, they might get the wrong idea."  Just a couple of congregating fairies!

Then there's an important point, later in the novel, when Sweeney is told about Raoul, owner of Raoul's Gift Shop.  Apropos of nothing, a man bluntly informs Sweeney: "This Raoul is a faggot."  A taxi driver  taking him to Raoul's tells Sweeney: "I know the joint.  The guy tried to make me once.  He's a queer."  Stop the presses!  QUEER MAN NAMED RAOUL OWNS GIFT SHOP!!!

Beware of "freaks" bearing gifts?

Observing the gift shop Sweeney comments cattily: "Two customers, both women, were within.  With Raoul, the proprietor, that made the feminine complement of the shop one hundred percent.  No one would ever have to wonder about Raoul."  YET Sweeney doesn't feel the urge to beat up Raoul and in the shop in fact is quite civil to the swish, in words and thoughts.  He even accompanies Raoul back to his apartment to get a glimpse of the man's statuary.  (Seriously.)  Outside Sweeney uneventfully passes Raoul's dinner guest for the evening: "A plump, beautiful young man with blonde curly hair."  

In short (on this matter), this is a book with quite a bit of incidental gay subject matter, or lavender color, shall we say.  In their language about gay males, avowedly straight men are pretty dismissive of them to other avowedly straight men as fairies, faggots, pansies, etc., yet on the other hand they are rather casual in their recognition and even acceptance of their existence, with Sweeney even adjuding some of them as pretty and beautiful even.  The attitude is actually better than what you would get from Elizabeth Linington's fictional cops in the Sixties and Seventies into the Eighties, God help us.  

I came across Brown's senior pic in his Cincinnati high school annual in 1925, when he would have been eighteen, and was struck to find that he was, yes, a pretty young man with blond hair.  Not plump; he stood 5'5 and 1/2" and weighed only 120 pounds.  I wonder whether he ever got hit on by other men?  

"Brownie" as he was inevitably known, gave his motto as "a poet is a musician of words" and he was stated to be one of the high school's "littérateurs."  Precociously, he had already "received notice" for his poems and stories.  He was also a "musician of note."  (He played the flute, not traditionally deemed the most masculine of instruments.)  The annual concluded with a reference to his diminutive stature, writing: "It seems that his ability is inversely proportional to his size, for he one of the smallest members of out class."  Yes, annual, small men can be talented at other things besides jockeying.  

the youthful author, age 18, small of stature, but of great promise

It was a surprising find for me, because if you see his author photo from the jacket of The Fabulous Clipjoint, which presumably was taken when he was about forty years old, Brown is not pretty at all and, indeed, he looks prematurely aged, even wizened.  He could pass for someone in his fifties.  

The fresh-faced, angelic-looking kid of two decades earlier is long gone.  He married young in 1929, a few years out of high school, to Helen Brown, a second cousin, then worked as a newspaper proofreader for the Post in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home of his wife's family, publishing his first pulp fiction a decade later, opening a floodgate of writing in the Forties.  

I would not have recognized the man from his later photo, which just goes to show that all those detective novels hinging on someone's looks having drastically changed over twenty years may not be so unlikely after all.  The malevolent miracles that booze and tobacco could do!

Fredric Brown around age forty. Sweeney's
description from the book, except for height
and weight, seems to fit the author to a T:
five feet eleven inches tall...a hundred and 
sixty-three pounds.  He had sandy hair that 
was receding at the front and getting a little 
thin on the top, but was mostly still there. 
He had a long thin face, 
vaguely horse-like, but not, on the   
whole, unpleasing to the uncritical eye. 
He looked to be about forty-three,
which is not stange, because that is how old
he really was.  He wore glasses with light-
colored shell rims for reading and working.

I suspect a lot of the drinking in Brown's books was biographical.  I don't believe any man can write that much about boozing without having partaken a great deal from the baneful bottle himself.  If you look at Sweeney's description in the book (see right), the author seems to be describing himself, barring height and weight, to which he adds inches and pounds.  

In a column from 1982 the late Ed Gorman wrote that Brown a decade earlier had "chain-smoked himself into a horrible death at age 65."  Me, I'm guessing that alcohol assisted in the push-off. I think pretty clearly this was a man bedeviled by a lot of demons.

But the fact that Brown wrote what he knew--stenographer at a detective agency, a newspaper proofreader and a writer for newspapers and pulps--gives his books a solid realistic base, even when he soars, as he often does, into flights of fantasy.  (He was a noted sci-fi writer as well and even his crime fiction has strong elements of the surreal and fantastic.) 

In Mimi, Sweeney loves classical music and hates swing.  A whole page is devoted to Sweeney listening to Mozart's 40th Symphony, his favorite piece of music.  More biography, I am guessing.  

Now, let's get--finally--into the plot of Mimi.  

Wandering the streets of Chicago at night, thinking how to get some money after blowing his wad, Sweeney stumbles onto a most memorable crime scene indeed!  

Beyond a six-foot wide double doorway, in the lighted hall of an apartment building, is a beautiful, bleeding, blonde (female this time) lying prone on the carpet, a great dog over her, growling at onlookers.  Was she attacked by the dog?  No, it turns out that this is Yolanda Lang, Chicago stripper, and she uses the dog in her act.  (He unzips her dress, I kid you not.)  It seems she's the latest victim of the Ripper slayer who is going around stabbing beautiful blondes in Chicago, though fortunately she, unlike the other poor women, survived the attack.  

Sweeney is quite smitten with the lovely lady (especially after she ends up stark naked in the hallway) and he resolves to get back on the wagon again so her can get onto to Yolanda's.  This necessitates that he get his reporting job back, so he files a great eyewitness account of this latest Ripper attack.  His editor actually was using Sweeney's vacation days to cover his binge, so Sweeney still has some time left to investigate the Ripper killings on his own.  What he finds on his own bat is pretty astounding. 

Central to the grim mystery is an ebony statuette of a beautiful female body positioned in a stance of utter, abject fear, nicknamed "Screaming Mimi."  (This is where Raoul's Gift Shop comes in.) 

It seems that our deranged serial killer is dangerously obsessed with the mass-produced Mimi statuette.  Raoul happens to have another at this place and it's not a come-on from the gift shop owner. ("Would you care to see the statuette?...I assure you I have no ulterior motive Mr. Sweeney.")  

Now Sweeney has a copy....

I think that will suffice as a plot description.  I'll just add that the plot is clever indeed, probably an original spin on the serial killer plot.  I was not as emotionally engaged with The Screaming Mimi as I was with The Far Cry, I have to admit.  Mimi is more of a classic detective novel, with cops and quite a bit of discussion of alibis and timetables and the like, where Far Cry to me seems more like the intricately plotted, page-turning suspense novels of writers like Margaret Millar and Ruth Rendell. 

However, Mimi is very clever indeed and I am not surprised that it made it onto the big screen, though with the first go-round that probably had something to do with the fact that a stunning stripper is one of the main characters.  Although it changed a lot of things, the second film version is actually more faithful to the book. I'll have more to say about both film versions of the novel soon.  

Finally, I want to include one little bit of writing from the book that actually made me smile.  Fredric Brown can be a very funny writer.  The first thing I ever read by him, over forty years ago, was a reprint of his comic Fifties sci-fi novel Martians Go Home, which, admittedly, I hated at the time, but would probably better appreciate now.  Discussing the prior Ripper killings with a press colleague, Sweeney learns that one worked in Raoul's Gift Shop (yup, Raoul again), one was a B-girl (a pretty woman hired by a bar to get patrons to drink more) and one a private secretary.  This prompts Sweeney to ask sardonically:

"How private?  Kind that has to watch her periods as well as her commas?"  

Kudos to Brown the proofreader for slipping that line in the book!  It's almost as good as Hammett's gunsel.  

Silver Sundays: CozyNoir? Out of the Past (1953), by Patricia Wentworth

Genteel English 'manners" mystery fiction arguably achieved its apogee in the late mid-to-late 1930s and the 1940s with such crime writers as Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer, Patricia Wentworth, Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake, to name some of the subgenre's most prominent exponents.  Even writers not directly association with manners mystery, like Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, published manners-ish mysteries like Five Little Pigs and The Hollow (Christie) and The Emperor's Snuff-box (Carr).  Even a sober "Humdrum" mystery writer like John Rhode at this time published a succession of books about a posh policeman who falls in love with and marries a genteel suspect in one of his cases.  

At the same time, however, American hard-boiled writers, along with their British imitators, were producing tough mysteries that were anything but genteel.  You might argue that these too were "manners mysteries," reflecting the manners not of posh society but rather of the mean streets and grim back alleys.  Not public schools, but the age old school of hard knocks.  

Raymond Chandler published his first head-boiled crime novel The Big Sleep in 1939 and two years later saw the release of director John Huston's adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled crime novel The Maltese Falcon.  The tough stuff was really on its way, both on the printed page and on film.  It was soon supplemented by film noir, which was even harder than hard-boiled was.  That particular egg was not just hard-boiled but positively rock-solid.  

One of the greatest of noir films, Out of the Past starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and Kirk Douglas, was released in 1947.  (It's #7 here.)  Out of the Past was also, seemingly incongruously, the title of crime writer Patricia Wentworth's 23rd Miss Silver crime novel, which was first published in 1953 in the United States and appeared in England two years later.  

Despite the tough reputation of United States as the land of hard-boiled and noir crime fiction--not to mention, in real life, rampant gangsterism and gun violence, police corruption and third degree, race riots and lynchings--cozy crime fiction was extremely popular there, arguably more so than in England.  It's two greatest progenitors, Agatha Christie's Miss Marple series and Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver series, while both English in origin were beloved in the US by the 1950s.  Some Americans valued escape into cozier pastures, it seems.  Still, cozy does not necessarily mean insipid, as insufferably chauvinistic, mansplaining detractors like Otto Penzler pronounced back in the 1980s and 1990s.  

The English first edition cover illustration
(also used on the first pb edition)
simply screams noir.  It comes straight from
a scene in the book, as Pippa returns late in the
night to Cliff's Edge, her white dress stained red
with blood--a scene crying out to be filmed.  

Could Queen of Cozy Crime Patricia Wentworth have had the great noir film in mind when she chose her title for her 23rd Miss Silver mystery?  I don't know, but her Out of the Past is indeed rather on the dark side a Miss Silver mystery.  A Miss Silver mystery is never going to end truly bleakly, but the novel does have some real midnight moments from the author.

For one thing the novel's first murder victim, Alan Field, is a real right bastard whom you truly get to despise before someone finally knives him in the back one deadly night in his beach hut.  We learn in a prologue--another noirish feature, uncommon in trad crime novels back then--that three years earlier innocent, young Carmona Leigh was to marry charming, so handsome Alan, much to the dismay of James Hardwick, who had fallen in love at first sight with her after glimpsing her in a box opposite him at the theater.  (Tres romantique!)

Then in Chapter One we find that Alan for some reason dumped Carmona--on her wedding day, no less.  This sort of thing seems to happen with alarming frequency in Wentworth novels. 

That done, Alan then headed out to parts unknown in South America, leaving his formerly intended Carmona to wed, yes, James Hardwick on the rebound.  The rest of the novel is mostly set at James Hardwick's family home, Cliff Edge, which he has just inherited but will have to sell, the Fifties not being a great decade for private ownership of great country houses.  (See my last blog review, of Georgette Heyer's Detection Unlimited.)  

The Hardwicks are entertaining guests at Cliff Edge, naturally, including Carmona's platinum blonde old school friend Pippa Maybury, who has a nice solid, even stolid, obliging husband in the background, but is rather a reckless and wayward flirt.  Then there's Carmona's Aunt Esther Field, who also is Alan's stepmother. (Like the Menendez brothers Monsters series, these Wentworth novels get almost incestuous at times.)   

Esther's husband and Alan's father was the late famed artist Penderel Field.  Alan has his father's fair good looks and fatal charm, if none of his artistic talent.  He does have a certain talent, I should say, though of an altogether less admirable sort.  

wicked Alan Field, depicted in a 1961 American newspaper serialization of Out of the Past

There's also well-preserved Lady Adela Castleton, one of those handsome and outspoken "public" women in vintage English mysteries, and Colonel and Mrs. Trevor, the colonel's garrulous wife.  And there are the neighbors the Annings, mother and daughter, who to get by have to make their home available to paying guests.  In their employ they have a sneaking French maid, Marie, a listener at doors who could have stepped right out of the pages of Bleak House.  

Into this milieu returns Alan--out of the past, as it were--and nobody's happy to see him.  For one thing he promptly begins to blackmail, in varying degrees, no fewer than three of the women and he viciously imparts some devastating information to Carmona that threatens to destroy her marriage.  It's clear that Alan not only uses women, but that he derives considerable cruel enjoyment from doing so.  He's a  despicable, conscienceless and sadistic character and you're glad to see him removed from this world. Did his crooked South American doings finally catch up with him, or did someone closer at hand--and altogether more genteel--put paid to his existence?

Jane Greer in Out of the Past

For Wentworth, this seemed a dark book.  There is adultery--up to a point--illegitimate birth (but not abortion), apparent suicide and dementia--and I'm not even talking about the servants!  The mystery, I would allow, is not one of the most intricate deception, but the anxiety level is sky-high.  I think it really helps in terms of evaluating Wentworth if we stop trying to force her into Christie's Chinese puzzle box and let her exist independently as an artist.  In some ways she seems to me the British Mignon Eberhart (who was called, erroneously, America's Agatha Christie), putting a high premium on the emotional drama inevitably generated by cases of unnatural death. On her own terms I find Wentworth a compelling crime writer.  This is a true detective novel, but it's also a novel of domestic suspense, yet another feminine subgenre that came to fore in the Fifties, along with cozy crime fiction.  

Indeed, Out of the Past is so serious that Miss Silver, who just happens to be staying at the Annings with her niece Ethel Burkett, only coughs 14 times.  This is just not the time to indulge oneself!

A Trifle too Unlimited: Detection Unlimited (1953), by Georgette Heyer

"From what I've seen, I shouldn't think there's a house or cottage in Thornden where they aren't chewing over the crime at this very moment."

[Mrs. Haswell] and Miss Patterdale were agreed that although it was disagreeable to persons of their generation to have a murder committed in their midst, it was very nice for the children to have something to occupy them, Thornden being such a quiet place, with really nothing to do in it at this season, except to play tennis.

--Detection Unlimited, Georgette Heyer

The late Professor Jacques Barzun, who died a dozen years ago at the age of 104, was a vocal defender of classic detective fiction for over half a century.  While he could be unappreciative, even patronizing, of  women suspense writers, castigating them not merely as HIBK (Had I But Known)--a dismissive acronym which had been applied by critics before him to popular authors like Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon Eberhart--but as, to use his own term, EIRF, which stands for Everything Is Rather Frightening.  

What interested Barzun in his preferred examples of crime fiction was not domestic disquiet but devoted detection.  He was especially uninterested in the tribulations of mid-century housewives which filled the pages of books by such women crime writers as Celia Fremlin, Ursula Curtiss and Charlotte Armstrong.  Sounding like a judgmental bystander in Eden, he pronounced EIRF novels a "feminine error."

However, there was a group of women writers whom Barzun adored: the cadre of detective novelists from the Golden Age of detective fiction who had been collectively dubbed England's Crime Queens: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.  Novels by each of these authors he included in his and Wendell Hertig Taylor's reprint series One Hundred Classics of Crime.  (These were The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Strong Poison, Dancers in Mourning and Swing, Brother, Swing). 

There was one other English lady from the Golden Age of detective fiction whom Barzun believed merited inclusion in these august ranks, one who ironically was not known primarily for detective fiction: prolific regency romance writer Georgette Heyer.  Her mystery A Blunt Instrument was another of Barzun and Taylor's entries in their Classics of Crime.  

Georgette Heyer published a dozen detective novels between 1932 and 1953, ten of these between 1932 and 1942 at the height of the Golden Age, with two stragglers appearing in the early 1950s, after which the author retired from the mystery field, though she continued steadily publishing her regency romances nearly up to her death in 1974 at age 71.  I think Barzun is well-justified in his admiration for Heyer's detective novels.  There are a few weaker numbers in the lot (see below), but generally it's a most impressive body of work for fans of classic genteel detective fiction.  

Thriller Book Club ed. from the 1950s

When I started reading detective fiction again in 1989--I had stopped reading it for six years when I was enrolled in college and law school--one of the authors I started reading was Georgette Heyer, who had recently been reprinted in paperback by Berkley.  I read most of the Heyers over the course of a year or less, I believe.  

Yet I didn't read the last one or the first two, where Heyer was still acquainting herself with the style and mechanics of detective fiction.  Her last one, Detection Unlimited, I actually started several times for no fewer than three decades but I never got anywhere close to finishing it.  My attention always wandered.  

Why was this?  Having finally stuck with it this time and read it over the course of about a week, I see why.  It's rather long by my count (95,000 words maybe?), very talky and discursive, with underdeveloped characters.  Of course all of Heyer's mysteries are chitty chatty, as it were, and usually the chitchat, at which the author typically excels, is a high point of her writing, Heyer (pronounced "hare," like a rabbit) being a very witty writer.  But here the talk just went on and on and on.  One character talked in a two-page paragraph of about 900 closely printed words.  The attention inevitably wanders.

I think Heyer's return to detective fiction in 1951 was a bit half-hearted.  Her commitment had always been somewhat shaky: Her lawyer husband, George Ronald Rougier, actually plotted the books as far as the murders went, though she did all the writing; and her romances far outsold her mysteries so she had less financial incentive to write them.  Also her disdain for modern, post WW2 (i.e. Labour governed) England really comes through in the last book, which is classically set in a provincial English village.  The denunciations of how much the owners of big houses in England are suffering gets a bit heavy-handed.  The passage below is one of the most sweeping condemnations of Labour-era England that I have come across in a detective novel from the period.

Coming upon, in the village of Thornden, the the dilapidated country mansion Old Place, home of the Squire and his wife (their childless son was killed in the Second World War and the estate and will be inherited, upon the Squire's death, by a cousin in South Africa), Chief Inspector Hemingway, in charge of the investigation of the local murder of obnoxious solicitor Sampson Warrenby, disgustedly says: "Progress."  Then this passage follows:

But he said it to himself, well-knowing that his companion, inevitably reared in the hazy and impracticable beliefs of democracy-run-riot, would derive a deep, if uninformed, gratification from the reflection that yet another landowner had been obliged, through excessive taxation, to throw out of work the greater part of his staff.

Hemingway's companion, poor, young Constable Melkinthorpe, recalls that there once were many more people employed at the Old Place, adding: "Of course, things are different now."  This draws the ire of Hemingway, who snaps: "They are....And the people as notice it most are those gardeners and grooms and gamekeepers.  So you put that into your pipe, my lad, and smoke it!"

a very 70s take on a 50s novel
presumably this is Charles and Abby
(see below)

Most of the Golden Age British detective writers looked unfavorably on the welfare state, but Heyer probably more so than most.  When Joan Aiken Hodge published her biography of Heyer in 1985 an Australian newspaper reviewer was struck by the author's strident conservative misanthropy.  By the Fifties, the reviewer observed, her "blacklist" encompassed writers, publishers, agents, the Department of Inland Revenue, bureaucrats, socialists, publicists, Americans, weak Tories, the Irish and the Welfare State.

Of course the Labour Party did want to redistribute wealth and make society more equitable.  Did they go too far, or not far enough?  Or did they get it--like the porridge upon which Goldilocks, doubtless a covetous leftist, impudently supped--just right?  This is a subject for debate, but Heyer in her books was not really interested in debate but rather declamation. 

In defending the privileges of the landed gentry, the author impugns the motivation of those desirous of promoting greater social equity as nothing more than envious desire to do down the landlords.  She's not thinking of the wealthy, mind you, it's their servants.  We have to keep up the Great Houses in private ownership in order to provide employment for butlers, gardeners and lady's maids.  Don't do it for the lords of the manors; do it for their lady's maids!

Of course other beneficiaries of this regime were classic English mystery writers--we fans love us our country house parties, whatever our political persuasions.  There's no question that the austerity era in England took a lot out of the vintage English mystery.  Many writers adapted pretty well to the changes, but some did not. 

I tend to think that someone as out of tempo with modern times as Heyer was probably would not ever have adapted.  In her regencies society could be kept in stasis for as long as she wrote them.  It reminds me of how mystery writer John Dickson Carr--who, though an American, was temperamentally like Heyer (though she apparently didn't like Americans and she didn't like Carr's mysteries)--turned decisively to period mystery fiction in the Fifties because there was so much about modern England that he couldn't abide.  So Heyer was probably right to abandon detective fiction when she did.  In any event, I believe that around this time her husband became too busy with legal work to contribute his share to the effort.  

Detection Unlimited doesn't make a bad swan song; it's just a bit of a curate's egg: only good in spots.  In his summary of the novel in A Catalogue of Crime, Jacques Barzun, a conservative himself, complained that the detection was "a trifle too unlimited," with altogether too much idle chatter.  I think he's right.  There is a lot to like in this book if you like classic English detective fiction of the more genteel sort, but the action is too diffuse.  The novel needed tightening and some weeding out of characters.  Those discarded country house gardeners might have been of some use here, metaphorically speaking!

the placid village of Thornden
in Detection Unlimited

Heyer plunges us right into village life on page one and the hopefully hardy reader really has to weather a welter of character introductions in the first few chapters just to get on with it.  There is a frontis map of the village (which does matter), but inexcusably no cast of characters, at least in my edition.  Besides the squire and his wife, there's another rich guy, an estate agent, and his wife, who are the parents of the male love interest in the story, Charles Haswell.  He's interested in Abby Dearham, the pretty secretary of a novelist and niece of a local spinster.  

These two characters, probably around the age of my parents at the time, as mentioned provide the obligatory love interest in the book, but it's a minor thread in a rather busy tapestry, crowded with characters.  

Not surprisingly love interest is normally a big part of Heyer's detective stories.  Heyer's lovers exchange great repartee and never get soppy or gushy about things.  That sort of thing--emotional exhibitionism--just isn't done by sensible people in a Georgette Heyer novel.  

Anyway, back to the characters, there's Thaddeus Drybeck, a fuddy-duddy older attorney who hated the younger, more energetic and successful upstart Sampson Warrenby, the novel's murderee.  Then there's Mavis Warrenby, the dead man's niece, who clearly has a yen for a handsome displaced Pole in the village, of whom her uncle disproved.  He's not the first Pole encountered in a mystery by Heyer, who despite her extreme Britishism was of Russian descent.  On hearing there's a Pole in the case, Chief Inspector Hemingway is nonplussed, to say the least of it:

"If I'd been told there was a Pole mixed up in this case I'd have reported sick....I've had one case with a Georgian mixed up in it, and two more with Poles, and they pretty nearly gave me a nervous breakdown."

Mavis Warrenby is a pious doormat, and if there's another thing Hayer hates, it's pious doormats.  She's even dismissed as "pi."  Against all evidence she's always insisting that her uncle was a nice man and that she liked him as any niece should, though he clearly wasn't and she clearly didn't.  We never see Warrenby alive, but it's made clear that everyone in the village couldn't stand him because he was a pushing upstart newcomer who wanted to be the top dog--a "pocket Hitler" as someone calls him.  "He is recognizable as a character created only to be murdered," says waspish local detective novelist Gavin Plenmeller in a meta moment, accurately enough.  

The niece is repeatedly disparaged--and not solely by Gavin--as a gormless nitwit.  After enough of this I started to feel a little sorry for her and even for her uncle.  (We never actually get to see him alive, we just hear him repeatedly disparaged after his death.)  Heyer's attitude to dutiful do-gooders is a lot like John Dickson Carr's: utterly scathing.  See these comments from the author's lovers, Abby and Charles:

ABBY: "There was a girl at school awfully like [Mavis], always saying, 'Oh, I don't think we ought to!' and being kind and forgiving to everyone, and saying improving things.  She was the most ghastly type! And the worst thing about people like that is that they actually believe in their own acts.  I wouldn't mind half so much if they were doing it deliberately, and stayed honest inside, but they don't."

CHARLES: "All I know about her is that she chose to come down here and act as a sort of unpaid drudge for an out-and-out swine, who wasn't even decently polite to her, rather than get a job and be able to call her soul her own."

This is ironic given that Charles ostensibly has a job but seems able to spend all his time with Abby doing amateur detecting. (What fun!)  Abby even asks him at one point if he ever goes to work.  In truth I think Heyer liked best her Regency bucks who never had to dirty their hands in trade.  Her favorite characters are blunt types who speak their minds--at least if it's conservative entiments coming out of their mouths.  She puts these characters in all of her mysteries, and frequently they are quite funny, if sometimes unwarrantably cruel.  In Detection Unlimited the top "blunt" character is aforementioned mystery writer Gavin Plenmeller, who inherited an estate in the village from his late brother.  He perennially offends everyone in the village--well, not goody-two-shoes, forgiving Mavis--with his outspoken comments.  

There is also a major and his Pekinese-breeding wife.  Her pack of prize-winning Pekes, all of whom derive their names from the letter "U," may be the most amusing thing in the book.  Then there's a London stockbroker turned gentleman farmer and his young wife and baby.  It's a lot of characters to remember--at one point Chief Inspector Hemingway announced he has nine or ten suspects.  This novel could have been called Too Many Suspects, but that title was already taken.

Sampson Warrenby is found shot dead on his garden bench after a tennis party attended by most of the village notables and then we are off to the races.  Scotland Yard, in the form of Hemingway and his underling, Inspector Horace Harbottle, make an entertaining investigative team.  Birdlike, inquisitive and perceptive Hemingway goes back to the Thirties, when he was a deputy to Superintendent Hannasyde.  He's always been one of my favorite fictional police detectives.   

I like Harbottle a lot too and I think it's a shame this is his only appearance.  A "walking tombstone" with a "quelling sort of face," sober Harbottle is an abstemious evangelical type whom it's easy for Hemingway to get a rise out of, but in this case it's affectionately done.  I enjoyed this exchange:

"It's all very well to be sent into the country," [Harbottle] said suddenly, "but I don't like this case, Chief!"  

"That's because you've got an inferiority complex," responded Hemingway, unperturbed.  "I thought there'd be trouble when they started talking about the Squire.  It set you off remembering the days when you were one of the village lads, carting dung, and touching your forelock to the Squire."

"I did no such thing!" said his indignant subordinate.  'What's more I never carted dung in my life, or touched my forelock! I hadn't got one, and I wouldn't have touched it if I had!"

"One of the Reds, were you?  Well, it's no use brooding over the equality of man here, because that won't get us anywhere."

Sorry you only got one novel, Horace, my lad. We hardly knew ye!  With Horace you might be reminded of PC Glass from A Blunt Instrument, whose Bible quotations invariably got under Hemingway's skin.  

The murder plot mechanics provided by Heyer's husband are good, but the whole thing feels rather labored and the denouement is rushed with a rustic ex machina, not to mention anti-climactic, as if Heyer realized, damme, I had better be getting this thing over with.  I'm glad I finally read Detection Unlimited, but I'm guessing I won't ever read it again, something I never thought about her other books, which reward rereading.  

I'll draw to a close with this bit of conversion between Gavin, the detective novelist, and Abby, the secretary to a mainstream author.  It's rather in the nature of shop talk for a mystery writer.  What do you prefer, persons or problems?  

"There is nothing to solve except the comparatively uninteresting matter of the identity of the murderer.  No hermetically sealed room, no unusual weapon, too few seemingly unshakeable alibis."

"Well, I think the identity of the murderer is far more interesting than those other things," objected Abbey,  "Fascinating, when one actually knows all the people," she added naively.

"Ah, yes, but you, my sweet, are a female.  Persons are more interesting to you than problems."

Sundays with Miss Silver: Make New Friends, but Keep the Old, One is Silver.... The Chinese Shawl (1943), by Patricia Wentworth

After four installments with thrillerish elements, the Miss Silver series really came into its own as a true detective series in 1943 with The Chinese Shawl.  Just as the author would give English mystery fans some paradigmatic village mysteries in the 1940s and 1950s, in 1943 with The Chinese Shawl she gave her readers a classic country house party mystery, just as the mystery subgenre's heyday was passing  during the Second World War.  England would never be the same after the war and neither would classic mystery, though both would find a way to survive austerity--austerity both of means and of murderous invention.   

it was such a lovely thing--
black ground and deep black fringe,
every inch of the ground worked over
in a pattern of fantastic loveliness
and all the colors of a fairy tale

Unlike a lot of other mysteries from the time, The Chinese Shawl frankly acknowledges the war; indeed, the war permeates the book from the first page, when mention is made of German air raids.  The protagonist of the novel is twenty-one year old Laura Fane, a lovely, sweet-natured, orphan gel who has just come into control of her inheritance, which consists of an income of L400 a year (about 24,000 pounds today or 31,000 dollars).  

Three-fourths of this amount comes from the rental of the country estate The Priory to her first cousin, once removed, Agnes Fane, who lives there with her first cousin Lucy Adams (also a first cousin, once removed to Laura).  Both women are spinsters of a certain age, imposing Agnes being stated to be 57 or 58 and dumpy Lucy presumably thereabout.  

Laura lives in the country with an aunt and does war work as a secretary at a home for convalescing soldiers and she also has plenty to do around the house, what with her aunt only having one maid these days.  (Drat the war!)

At The Priory Agnes and Lucy raised another, much younger orphaned cousin: Tanis Lyle, who if this were a contemporary book by Anglo-American hard-boiled author Raymond Chandler would unquestionably be the femme fatale and likely murderer of the tale.  Instead, she's our murderee.  Well, what else can you do when you have an exotic name like that, other than engage in femme fatalery?  

A stage actress in her late twenties, Tanis has already been married (and divorced) and she has a young child, who is being raised away somewhere, in Scotland I think, by its grandmother.  (They did call young children "its" in those days.)  She now specializes in flirting with other girls' boyfriends, taking and then casually discarding them.  She is not exactly beautiful but knows how to present herself.  She has ambitions of "going Hollywood."  All in all, it's a classic good girl-bad girl contrast between the virginal, naturally blooming English rose Laura and the hothouse, forced Tanis, who presumably has been not just around the block but a multitude of surrounding neighborhoods, if not entire towns.  

Laura is in London to meet her lawyer and when she does she discovers from him that Agnes wants to buy The Priory outright from her, for 12,000 pounds (over 700,000 today, or not too far off one million American dollars).  Agnes through Tanis invites Laura to a house party at The Priory, which she has never actually ever seen due to a family feud.  You see, over two decades ago her father, Oliver Fane, was supposed to marry his cousin Agnes but he backed out of the engagement when he fell in love with another woman, Laura's future mother.  Intensely passionate Agnes responded, naturally enough, by taking her favorite horse out for a ride and driving the poor beast so hard that they both ended up in the local quarry, where the horse was killed and Agnes crippled for life.  (Don't worry: she gets around expertly in a wheelchair.)  

This is quite a bit of backstory.  You see, we are in the world of the spacious detective novel of manners, which takes its time to background characters and lavishes attention on dialogue.  Laura doesn't even make it to The Priory until page fifty, a-fifth of the way into the novel, and Tanis stays alive and kicking and femme fataleing until page 108, nearly halfway into the book.  There's even another house party that takes place in London before the murder house party, where we first meet many of the characters, most of whom will become suspects in Tanis' slaying.  

There's intensly handsome RAF pilot Carey Desborough, recovering from a crash, whom Tanis' cousins (or aunts, Tanis calls them, on account of their being so much older) Agnes and Lucinda think is engaged to Tanis, though in fact Tanis has already thrown him over.  Carey of course falls in love at second sight with Laura.  Then there are two airmen on leave, brothers Robin and Alistair Maxwell.  The latter is one of Tanis' current victims (she's got several on a string, including her ex-husband), much to the frustration of kittenish young Petra North, who loves Alistair.  (Tanis and Petra--seems Agatha Christie wasn't the only Golden Age mystery writer interested in the middle east.)

I'm not even mentioning Miss Sophy Ferrers, a relation with whom Laura is staying in London who is like a character out of a Jane Austen novel.  But she disappears from the book after the scene shifts to The Priory.  Happily, Miss Silver, armed with her knitting bag and myriad Victorian maxims, is there, however, having been hired by Agnes to investigate some thefts at The Priory.  (Could it be their evacuees?)  

a cubist rendering of a triangle

I'm trying to pin down Miss Silver's age and here we find the retired governess turned sleuth was formerly a schoolmate of Lucinda, who presumably is around her cousin Agnes' age or a bit older.  The author herself was 65 when she wrote The Chinese Shawl.  She was born in 1877 and married a man old enough to be her father a couple of weeks after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, when she was 23.  

I think it's safe to assume that Miss Silver is around the age of the author.  People find her anachronistic in Fifties mystery, but after all there were then people, like the author, who had grown up under the reign of the first and last Empress of India and were young governesses when her son Edward ruled.

Miss Silver was in fact the governess of Randal Marsh, now Superintendent of fictional Ledshire, where The Priory is located.  He was introduced two years earlier in the more thrillerish Miss Silver mystery Danger Point, which in the current one we are told took place in Autumn 1939.  We also are told that Miss Silver actually saved Randal's life in the much alluded to case of the poisoned caterpillars, which presumably took place in the spring of '39, not to long after the events detailed in Lonesome Road.  Someone needs to do a pastiche of this lost case!

Conversation between these Randal and his former governess is affectionate but very proper and genteel, with much exclaiming of "My dear Randal!" and "My dear Miss Silver!"  Perhaps a bit precious but the author herself has plenty of experiences of governesses and nannies and no doubt knew her stuff. 

The murder investigation works its way to a dramatic--and dramatically satisfying--conclusion, and all in all I would say this is one of the best Miss Silver detective novels, pleasingly redolent with wartime atmosphere.  I see I haven't mentioned Laura's beautiful Chinese shawl, a gift from her father to her mother.  Don't worry: it's mentioned a lot in the book and it does play a part in the tale.  

Oh, yes, by my count Miss Silver coughs 22 times.  That cough will get more pronounced.  

Wentworth Wednesdays Putting One's Foot in It: The Blind Side (1939), Patricia Wentworth

Patricia Wentworth published 65 crime novels, 32 of them Miss Silvers and 33 of them not-Miss Silvers. As part of my Patricia Wentworth book project I'm rereading her books and trying to determine how many are true detective novels.  Grey Mask, the first Wentworth Silver, which was published back in 1928, is very much in thriller mode with a fiendish masked master criminal and his gang and an imperiled hero and heroine.  The next three Silvers--The Case Is Closed (1937), Lonesome Road (1939) and Danger Point (1941)--all have thrillerish elements.  However, the next one in the Silver series, The Chinese Shawl, is a classic manners mystery, absolutely a true detective novel and a very good one indeed.  (I hope I'll be talking about it this Silver Sunday.)  

Most of the 28 Silvers published in the series' heyday--the years between 1943 and 1961 (or really 1958)--are true detective novels, albeit with a good deal of romance in the mix.  But Wentworth also had some non-Silvers that are true detective novels, beginning, I believe, with The Blind Side (1939), in which Wentworth introduced her series Yard cops Inspector Ernest Lamb and his posh subordinate Sergeant Frank Abbott.  

The next year Lamb and Abbott would appear in another detective novel, Who Pays the Piper?, then in 1943, the year of the pivotal shift in Wentworth's writing, she would pair the two policemen with Miss Silver is Miss Silver Deals with Death, aka Miss Silver Intervenes.  Ernest Lamb would then appear in a dozen more Miss Silver novels, the last of them The Listening Eye in 1955, and Frank Abbott another twenty including the last in the Silver series, The Girl in the Cellar, in 1961.  

Appearing without Miss Silver in The Blind Side, Lamb and Abbott make a classic English cop team, Lamb being the older, married, more rough-hewn one and Lamb the younger, posher-than-thou public school educated type who started becoming quite prevalent in English mystery in the Thirties.  

A leading example of the "glamor boy" type of Yard man is the King of the Swells, Ngaio Marsh's Inspector Roderick Alleyn.  Then there are posh young detective sergeants like E. R. Punshon's Bobby Owen, John Rhode's Jimmy Waghorn and Freeman Wills Crofts' Rollo.  (I forget the latter's first name, but the surname "Rollo" always seems to indicate poshness in English mystery.)  

Lamb and Abbott are quite enjoyable here, even if they don't manage to solve the case.  This job is left to an amateur, the romantic hero in the tale, which reflects the author's thriller background.  This person is very similar to Wentworth's thriller heroes, a handsome and personable thirty-year-old India Army man named Peter Renshaw.  Practically all the major men in the author's life were Army, particularly India Army, including, from the latter group, her father, uncle and first and second husbands. 

Like Frank Abbott, Peter comes from an elite public school background, just like the men in the author's life.  Indeed, it turns out Abbott and Peter were at the same public school at the same time.  I quote this exchange between Lamb and Abbott, which is apt to provoke snickers today, especially from Americans:

"Well, sir, we were at school together for a bit.  He's older of course.  I--well, as a matter of fact, I fagged for him."

"And you say he's a cool card?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, remember you're not fagging for him now."

Get that, man: none of that Peter fagging!  Abbott's nickname at school was "Fug," so of course Peter calls him Fug throughout the story.  If Peter ever wrote a book about their relationship, doubtlessly he would have titled it My Fag Fug.  

Probably now I should back up a bit and explains just who gets murdered and who the suspects are.  The book is set at Craddock House, the ancestral London home of Ross Craddock, whose father divided the swell place into lucrative flats.  There's an all-important family tree, which doesn't appear until page 75 of the 1991 Warner Books edition I read, page 66 of the Forties Popular Library edition.  These things should always be frontis exhibits in my opinion.  

Death at the Flat

Anyway, at the opening of the novel Ross lives in a flat at Craddock House.  He let additional flats on the same floor gratis to his older first cousins, once removed, sisters Lucy and Mary Craddock, and to Peter, his first cousin.  Mary Craddock has recently passed away and Ross plans to evict her sister Lucy, who makes a habit of butting into his life about his rakish romancing of young, vivacious Mavis Grey, his second cousin and Lucy's niece.  Ross, you see, is something of a wicked man-about-town, don't you know.  Impetuous young stockbroker Bobby Foster doesn't like Ross' avid pursuit of Mavis either.

modern Dean Street Press ed.

Then there is another second cousin of Ross, pretty Lee Fenton, who has this little problem with sleepwalking.  Did she go sleepwalking after falling asleep in Aunt Lucy's flat while reading The Corpse with the Clarionet?  Was it she who left all those bloodstained footprints in Ross' flat on the morning of the murder? Drat!

When Ross gets shot in his flat early one debauched morning, all of his surviving relations, all of whom just happened to be on the scene at various times around the time of his death, are suspects.  Every one of them, it seems, had motives to kill the rich basta--erm, I mean, the poor victim.  

These complicated genteel class cousinly relationships are a staple of Patricia Wentworth novels, but the author also has some good characters of a more modest nature, like proud caretaker and Great War veteran Albert Edward Rush, who doesn't say "sir" to officers of the law, and his bedridden wife, as well as bibulous char Mrs. Green.  

The comic char is a staple, if not cliche, of not only Golden Age detective novels but more recent ones (see Ruth Rendell and PD James, for example); but she's done to a turn here.  And let's not forget that nosy spinster on from a floor above, Miss Bingham--Wilhelmina Ethel to be exact.  Wentworth knew her spinsters.  

This is a very enjoyable detective novel in the classic Thirties style, wryly amusing and brightly characterized with the love interest pretty lightly and pleasingly etched in; and it even manages a surprising ending--at least it was such to me.  Very much recommended.  

I will be interested to see whether the second Lamb and Abbott mystery maintains the standard set by The Blind Side.  And whether they can manage to solve the case themselves.  We know they never got to when Maud Silver was around.