Murder Spree: Thirteen Men (1930), by Tiffany Thayer

"A Tale of Murder which is neither a Mystery nor a Detective Story"

As promised, here is the posting on Tiffany Thayer's 1930 bestseller, published by Claude Kendall, Inc., Thirteen Men (John Norris of the Pretty Sinister Books blog is posting on Thayer's Thirteen Women).  By the way, Thayer was a man, baby (yes, I'm doing Austin Powers).  His full name was Tiffany Ellsworth Thayer (1902-1959).

This is an unusual book, and I haven't completed it yet, to be honest, so the full review piece will be coming later!  I've nearly finished a 6000+word piece on Willoughby Sharp, which will serve as the introduction to the the forthcoming new editions of his two detective novels, Murder in Bermuda (1933) and Murder of the Honest Broker (1934).

But back to Mr. Thayer's first novel!  Surprisingly, given Thayer's popularity in the 1930s (which provoked the ire of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker), not a great deal seems to be available about him on the net.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
termed Tiffany Thayer's
books "slime"

The frontispiece to Thirteen Men suggests one source of Thayer's popularity: there is some salacious (by 1930s standards, anyway) sexual detail. There are other sources too, however.

Some of his work has criminous elements that put it at least on the borderland of crime fiction.  Thirteen Men somewhat resembles the classic jury mystery subgenre: you know, the type of mystery that takes place during a murder trial and focuses on the deliberations of the jury.

Raymond Postgate's Verdict of Twelve (1940) is probably the best known of this type of book from the Golden Age today, though in fact that were two other novels, both titled The Jury, by Eden Phillpotts and Gerald Bullett, that preceded it (published in 1927 and 1935, respectively; both are recommended).

The thirteen men of Thayer's book are a confessed serial murderer (he has admitted to shooting 39 people in several different cities) and the twelve people serving on the jury at his trial.  A chapter is devoted to each man, plus there's an opening chapter detailing the horrible events in the killer's crime wave.  The murders, which include the slayings of some children, are really rather grisly.

The chapters devoted to the jurors are character studies, each ending with the particular man getting the summons to jury duty.  These so far are well done, but I'm wondering where it all leads.  Are there any surprises in the final chapter?  What was the killer's motive?  Is he really the killer?  Is he found guilty?  I'm looking forward to finding out!

80 Years Ago Sunday: The Week in Todd Downing Mystery Reviews

On March 26, 1933 the Oklahoma detective novelist Todd Downing reviewed four mysteries for the Daily Oklahoman newspaper:

The Tuesday Club Murders (The Thirteen Problems), by Agatha Christie
The Hanging Captain, by Henry Wade
Red Warning, by Virgil Markham
Dr. Priestley Lays a Trap (The Motor Rally Mystery), by John Rhode

Short excepts:

The Tuesday Club Murders: Downing applauds the reappearance of "Aunt Jane"--that "no end quick-witted spinster of The Murder at the Vicarage"--in this short story collection.

The Hanging Captain: Downing praises Henry Wade's "eminently sane yarn written in the King's English."

Red Warning: There's "creeping horror" in this tale, Downing notes.  "For shudder addicts."

Dr. Priestley Lays a Trap: "Add and subtract with Dr. Priestley," writes a something less than enthralled Downing.  "For mechanically-minded folk."

Note the stylistic similarities to The Tuesday Club Murders--
Both books were published by Dodd, Mead,
one of the premier American publishers of mystery fiction.

There's much more on Todd Downing--his life, his detective fiction and his mystery review--in my 2013 book Clues and Corpses: The Detective Fiction and Mystery Criticism of Todd Downing.

Personally, I've read all four of these books and I liked them all!

And here's Willoughby Sharp!

William Willoughby Sharp (1900-1956)

Chad Ament of Coachwhip sent me two attachments of interest on Willoughby Sharp:

(1) a photo of the author (looking quite dapper, I must say)

(2) a photo of the front panel and spine of the dust jacket for Murder of the Honest Broker.

I thought people would like to see these, since I have been rattling on at some length about Mr. Sharp.  As far as I know this is the only photo on the net of William Willoughby Sharp II.*

*(of course there are many photos of his artist son, William Willoughby Sharp III)

on the floor of the Stock Exchange
something more than share prices
have dropped

And here on the left is the dust jacket from which the photo came. Yup, another dead body on the jacket this time, only it's located not in Bermuda but on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

"What's more welcome these days [as a corpse in a detective novel]," asked Todd Downing in his 1934 review of Murder of the Honest Broker, "than a nice, well-fed financier?"

Probably a lot of Depression-era mystery readers were thinking the same thing.  Willoughby Sharp, himself retired from stockbroking after a half-dozen years, generously provided detective fiction fans with not one, but two stockbroker corpses.

Murder of the Honest Broker (1934), by Willoughby Sharp

After the appearance in print of Murder in Bermuda (1933), Willoughby Sharp published one additional detective novel,  Murder of the Honest Broker (1934).  This is another good one, and makes one regret that it was Sharp's last published mystery tale (however, it may not have been the last one he wrote; see below).

ticker tape

Evidently unable to imagine creating yet another fictional crime wave in the rather pacific Bermuda, Sharp for his second novel shifted his setting in his second book to a locale much more used to murder: New York.

In Murder of the Honest Broker, Sharp also introduced an interesting new lead detective, Inspector Bullock.

An acerbic, tough guy cop, Bullock is endowed by his creator with an abiding hatred for the cloud of fictional super detectives, such as Philo Vance (naturally, don't you know) and Drury Lane, who plague New York, snapping up clever clues like hungry locusts and making fools of the police in the process:

"I'd like to run up against one of those mincing, namby-pamby, know-it-alls just once....Detectives!  Bah!  They and their Egyptian mummies and their stuffed fish and their underground passages and their Chinese hatchet men.  They give me a great big pain and I'll give you one guess where!"

The "honest broker" of the title is stockbroker Philip Torrent.  He dies on the floor of the Stock Exchange, from, it is soon determined  curare poisoning.  Unfortunately, Philo Vance is not available to solve what turns out to be a bookish crime indeed.

Classically, Sharp spends the entire first chapter providing some half-dozen people with motives to kill Torrent.  We have:

1. the brokerage partner, Temple Hastings, who has been defrauding Torrent
2. the unfaithful wife, Mary Torrent, who has been carrying on an affair with
3. the stockbroker Jack McDonald, who is madly in love with Mary
4. the debauched nephew, Howard Torrent, who wants the money his uncle holds in trust
5. the discarded mistress, Lucy Luverne, who is vowing vengeance upon Torrent
6. the partner in a dying speakeasy, Chipo Marinelli, who can't return Torrent's funds

Not only Philip Torrent meets his death by curare that day, however.  Bizarrely, another broker, Sandy Harrison, expires from the same cause as well.  Who had motives for slaying both men?  It's a thorny problem.

Inspector Bullock is, shall we say, short of sympathy for slain stockbrokers:

"Two members of the Stock Exchange have been poisoned."
"Whee!" whistled the Inspector.  "Ain't that what they call the perfect crime?  Somebody beat me to it!  I've had my eye on that job myself ever since the time I lost five hundred dollars in Anaconda Copper back in '29."*

*(this refers to a real life stock market debacle involving the Anaconda Cooper Mining Company and share pushing by Percy Avery Rockefeller)

 Bullock's hostile attitude spills over into his questioning of an Exchange assistant secretary, Mr. Barton:

an honest-to-goodness material clue

 "Will the head waiter be there [at the Luncheon Club] now?" asked Bullock.  "It's five o'clock."
"Yes," smiled Barton.  "It's another one of the blessings of Repeal [of Prohibition].  This time two years ago the club was deserted after three o'clock but now the members like to linger in our new bar and lately they've even taken to ordering dinners there."
"That's a funny thing," said Inspector Bullock.  "The exact same thing happened in my club, the McGillogolly Social Association of Brooklyn.  Lately we've has to throw the boys out on their pants at the closing hour."
Mr. Barton's face lost its affable smile.  "Oh, yes, quite," he finally managed to reply.

Inspector Bullock also is dubious about a case involving poisoning by curare:

"Don't tell me it's a strange, oriental poison known only to the high priests of an obscure tribe in the upper Himalayas.  Don't tell me that, 'cause I'm way behind on my Fu-Manchu stories."

Inspector Bullock is blunt in his injunctions to his underlings:

"That you, Mulligan?  Your troubles aren't over.  Go back to the Alden Apartments, sit downstairs in the lobby and if that girl goes out tonight you stick to her tighter than a chorus girl's brassiere."*

*(this passage is especially interesting in light of Sharp's marriage to chorus girl Muriel Manners, to whom the book is dedicated; one gathers Mr. Sharp knew his way around chorus girls every bit as much as he did the stock exchange).

lilies

Admittedly, the suspects in the novel are pretty stock (though Chipo Marinelli is that rarest of things in Anglo-American Golden Age mystery, an Italian male who doesn't spend all his time speaking in exaggerated dialect, gesticulating wildly and threatening people with death by stiletto; and the author should be duly credited in this case for eschewing an invidious Golden Age stereotype).

However, Inspector Bullock, bless his heart, is what we might term a real live one. Love him or hate him, you will remember him.

And the mystery plot is quite good too.  How the poisonings were brought about and who accomplished them are tricky questions, but the author plays fair. Bullock finally has to think like a Great Detective to solve the case!

Additionally, the setting seems authoritatively done--certainly Sharp had his experience with this milieu--and the book itself is beautifully designed (the same is true of Murder in Bermuda; see the illustrations on the left).

"Good reading and an ingenious solution," pronounced Kirkus Reviews back in 1934, of Murder of the Honest Broker.  The Saturday Review, on the other hand, inexcusably gave away a major plot point.  Avoid perusing this latter review on the internet, because--heads up!--Willoughby Sharp's two detective novels will be in print again before the end of the year.

There was supposed to be a third Willoughby Sharp detective novel in 1935, The Mystery of the Multiplying Mules, but it never appeared. What happened to this book?  Join me at my next stop at Willoughby and find out.

Murder in Bermuda (1933), by Willoughby Sharp

Both of Willoughby Sharp's detective novels, Murder in Bermuda (1933) and Murder of the Honest Broker (1934), are fine examples of the Golden Age mystery, with good fair play puzzles, swift narratives and some interesting background detail, taken from the author's own life.

In the case of Murder in Bermuda, Willoughby Sharp had been living on the island for two years when he wrote the novel, resulting in the book's interesting local color.  Bermuda had a commercial boom providing the United States with bootleg liquor during the Prohibition era, a development alluded to in the novel.

Murder in Bermuda details the investigation that occurs after Constable Simmons discovers a woman's body on Snake Road, on the morning before Easter.  The woman has been stabbed to death.  A bouquet of lilies is at her side.

The police are shocked to find that a murder has occurred on peaceful Bermuda.  "Damn it, Simmons!" cries Inspector McNear, "What's this island coming to when a girl's not safe on the highway?"

"[T]here has never been a murder in Bermuda in my time--not among our white people at least," pronounces a worried Chief of Police Masters. "I ask you to think of the most unpleasant publicity that would result if we admitted to be murder!  Think how the interests of the island would suffer!"  Here I was rather reminded of the attitude of the mayor in the film Jaws.

But murder it proves to be. And another person soon is found dead, a man, polished off by a favored 1920s poison, mercury bichloride.  "If there's another crime in Hamilton I'm going to move to Chicago," announces one local resident.*

*(How different things are today!  Between May 2009 and June 2012 there were seventeen gun murders in Bermuda, nine of them unsolved).

Murder in Bermuda actually could be designated an early police procedural, in that it depicts the whole Bermuda police force at work, with three individuals standing out: Inspector McNear, Chief of Police Masters and Superintendent Welch, who ultimately reaches the truth, after considerable peril to his life (Constable Simmons is the only black policeman we see in action; thankfully he is not used as cheap comic relief, as one might expect from a book from this period).

the notorious Lindbergh baby
kidnapping influenced additional
novels besides Agatha Christie's
Murder on the Orient Express

It quickly becomes apparent that the misdeeds in Bermuda may be connected in some way to the recent kidnapping of a child in the United States.

When introducing this subject, just a year-and-a-half after the infamous Lindbergh baby kidnapping (and a year before Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express), Sharp allows himself a little acid social commentary on the capricious and class-based news coverage priorities of the American press (some things don't change, do they?):

Quite typical of a rich, individualistic nation in which fifteen million men, with their wives and children, were undergoing various stages of starvation, the kidnapping of little Marcia Marsden from the Fifth Avenue home of her fabulously wealthy parents had filled the front sheets of America's daily newspapers until even the stirring foreign political news was crowded to an inside page.

Sharp's own son would be born three years later, but apparently Sharp felt that in those Depression-wracked years the travails of the rich and famous were absorbing a disproportionate share of press attention.

The Harvard Crimson gave Murder in Bermuda a great review (admittedly, Sharp was an alumnus), noting that Sharp "utilizes all the long-accepted conventions of the mystery story, but he does so with such ingenuity and creates such a  welter of involved circumstances that we are almost entirely unaware of his technical trickery."

The Crimson also noted the procedural aspect of the novel:

The pleasant variation from the general mystery story is the manner in which the various police officers working upon the case help each other and together see things through, so that in this story, instead of the one stereotyped super sleuth very nobly carrying on, we have the small group solve their problem by cooperative efforts. 

Murder in Bermuda represents a class of Golden Age detective novel largely forgotten today, because it doesn't conform to the popular stereotypes.  It's about neither a British gentleman amateur detective nor an American hard-boiled private eye, yet it's a good mystery tale nonetheless.

As the Crimson put it: "Mr. Sharp...has a good bit more to offer us than the average writer of murder stories.  He unravels his sinister tale in fine literary style and writes vividly of a background he knows very well."

A Stop at Willoughby: Murder in Bermuda (1933) and Murder of the Honest Broker (1934), by Willoughby Sharp

William Willoughby Sharp (1900-1956) came from a prominent New York family.  His father, also named William Willoughby Sharp, moved to New York from Norfolk, Virginia, where the Sharps had lived for generations (the Sharps claim descent from a certain James Sharp, who was living in Jamestown in 1621 and served in the House of Burgesses in the 1630s).

William Willoughby Sharp I was the senior partner in a brokerage firm when he was struck by a taxicab while crossing a street and killed.  A year before his father's death in 1926, William Willoughby Sharp II, a marine in the Great War and a Harvard graduate, formed his own brokerage firm, the forbiddingly named Harde & Sharp.  However, only three years later Sharp retired from business and moved to Bermuda, where he lived until 1935, when he returned to New York.

Muriel Manners Sharp
see Sharpville

Sharp married Muriel Manners, a Ziegfeld chorus girl, and the couple settled in Sands Point, Long Island, the wealthy enclave that inspired the setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby.

In 1936, the Sharps had a son, predictably named William Willoughby Sharp.  The third Sharp became a conceptual art guru in the 1960s and 1970s.  When he died in 2008, he received a sizable obituary in the New York Times.

William Willoughby Sharp II is rarely mentioned today (even accounts of his son's eventful and quirky life show much more interest in Muriel Manners Sharp's chorus girl background), but he was an interesting individual in his own right.

What concerns us most here, of course, is Sharp's brief venture into publishing and mystery writing.  For two years he was in partnership with publisher Claude Kendall, the man, much discussed here lately, who published Sharp's two detective novels, Murder in Bermuda (1933) and Murder of the Honest Broker (1934).

I will have full reviews of these two excellent detective novels up on the blog later today.

The Controversies of Claude Kendall, Publisher

No further word on the seemingly unsolved murder of Claude Kendall, but I thought I would write some on Kendall's career as a publisher, pending a Friday piece on the two Willoughby Sharp detective novels Kendall published, in 1933 and 1934.

Claude Kendall's first published book
a scathing critique of American culture

From the beginning Claude Kendall seems to have been something of a controversialist, looking for books to publish that might create a stir.  Kendall's first published book was Kanhayalal Gauba's Uncle Sham: The Strange Tale of a Civilization Run Amok (1929), a scathingly critical study of the United States, written in response to Katherine Mayo's scathingly critical study of India, Mother India (1927).  When review copies of Uncle Sham were sent to the United States from India, where it was originally published, the United States Customs Service seized the copies, having deemed the book obscene (Gauba spends much time disparaging American sexual mores).

After Kendall successfully published an American edition of Uncle Sham (the obscenity determination didn't stick), it was announced the next year that Aaron Sussman, an ad man and book designer, had gone into partnership with Kendall (though the title of the firm remained Claude Kendall, Inc).

The first book the two men published was Freak Show, a collection of short stories by Russian writer Andre Sobol.  The next book was Tiffany Thayer's Thirteen Men, a titillating tale about the trial of a mass murderer. It was a tremendous commercial success, seeing thirteen printings between May 1930 and June 1931.

Altogether Claude Kendall published four Tiffany Thayer novels, Thirteen Men, Call Her Savage, Thirteen Women and An American Girl.  The first three of these novels had sold over 387,000 copies by February 1933, but, unfortunately for Kendall, Thayer left him for greener publishing pastures.

Incidentally, I am going to be reviewing Thirteen Men next week, and John Norris of the Prettysinister blog will be reviewing Thirteen Women.

Kendall had other strings to his bow besides Mr. Thayer's works, however.  In 1931 he published the first American edition of Octave Mirbeau's classic Decadent Movement "exposition of sadism and masochism," Torture Garden ("Tiffany Thayer's Call Her Savage is good enough, if you like them savage," quipped the Virginia Quarterly Review, "and Octave Mirbeau's Torture Garden is for those who want to be tortured"). 

The same year, Kendall unsuccessfully attempted to secure the American and Canadian rights to James Joyce's Ulysses, anticipating the overturning of its proscription on obscenity grounds (this occurred in 1934). 

Other controversial novels published by Kendall in the early 1930s include G. Sheila Denisthorpe's Loveliest of Friends, a lesbian novel, and Frank Walford's Twisted Clay (Take a good look at the illustrations of Twisted Clay.  Needless to say the jacket design is eye-catching, but also note the fine decorative motifs on the book itself).

Twisted Clay, which Kendall pointedly announced in the New York press had been banned in Canada, sounds fascinatingly lurid.  The protagonist, Jean Deslines, has been described as a psychopath "whose downward spiral goes from premarital sex and lesbian tendencies to patricide, prostitution, serial murder, drug running, and eventual suicide."  It was banned not only in Canada, but in Australia, Walford's native country, for three decades!

Then there's Cecil De Lenoir's The Hundredth Man: Confessions of a Drug Addict, which was called "an excellent piece of journalistic writing," in the New York Times Book Review.

With classic publisher ballyhoo, Kendall called Lenoir a modern day Thomas De Quincey (see Confessions of an English Opium-Eater).

Kendall did find time to publish some less sensationalistic mystery novels (some of them even Simon Pure detective tales), about which I will be posting in more detail tomorrow!