Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Fatal Frontispieces

One of the great sources of appeal of the early Carolyn Wells detective novels(the ones published up to, say, about 1920) is purely in the physical design: the nicely decorated boards, the thick creamy pages and the beautiful color frontispieces.  John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), a great Carolyn Wells fan as a boy, shortly after WW2 nostalgically recalled "....colored frontispieces....the yellow gowns sweeping the floor, the padded rooms cozy with crime."*

*(Query: first use of the term "cozy" in regard to these sorts of books?)

Here are two examples of Carolyn Wells mystery frontispieces: the first, by Frances Rogers,  from The Clue (1909), and the second, by Gayle Porter Hoskins (1887-1962), from the The Curved Blades (1916). The latter illustrator studied at the School of Art Institute of Chicago and also did a lot of illustrations for western fiction pulps in the 1930s.

On the right, Cicely Dupuy and Schuyler Carleton confront the dead body of heiress Madeleine Van Norman ("Magnificent Madeleine"). She has been found stabbed in her country mansion, "the finest house in Mapleton [New Jersey]."  A purported suicide note lies on the desk by her side. Is it Murder?!!

Wells lavished her inevitably beautiful young female characters, like Magnificent Madeleine, with detailed descriptions: "Her dark hair, piled high on her head, was adorned with a dainty ornament which, though only a twisted ribbon, was shaped like a crown, and gave her the effect of an imperious queen.  Her low-cut gown of pale yellow satin was severe of line and accented with stately bearing, while her exquisitely modeled neck and shoulders were as white and pure as those of a marble state."

On the left, haughty brunette Pauline Stuart, niece of the murdered Lucy Carrington of Garden Steps, "one of the show-places of Merivale Park, Long Island," strikes a dramatic pose, while observed by an increasingly fascinated Fleming Stone, Great Detective; imperceptive police detective Hardy; Gray Havilland, handsome cousin of the murdered woman; and Anita Frayne, social climbing social secretary.

In some ways, The Curved Blades seems a reboot of The Clue.  Like Madeleine Van Norman, Lucy Carrington also is found dead in a chair in her mansion, but in much more (indeed rather splendidly) bizarre circumstances.  I'll be writing more about these books later this week.

7 comments:

  1. Hey! You are treading perilously close to my domain, sir! This colorful and informative post reminds me that I haven't done a "Drawing from the Past" post in a very long time. I treasure all my illustrated vintage mysteries, especially the ones with full color plates like these. One of my favorites is THE PATERNOSTER RUBY with several dramatically rendered scenes including the very often used illustration of a lavishly dressed woman training a revolver on a dapper gentleman.

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    1. I miss the old art and illustrations too, they added a lot of interest. When you have brilliant stories too (say, Sherlock Holmes), it's all the better.

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  2. Personally, and very idiosyncratically, I pinpoint the first "cosy" as Marcia Muller's "Edwin of the Iron Shoes", published in 1977. In order to start a fight in your comments section , here's the rest of my personal mystery chronology:
    Start of the Golden Age: Agatha Christie's "The Mysterious Affair at Styles", 1920
    End of the Golden Age: "The Horizontal Man" by Helen Eustis, in 1946. (Although I think the beginning of the end was signalled by the publication of Dennis Wheatley's "Murder Off Miami" in 1936.)
    1946 to 1977 was a kind of undefined interregnum dominated by the hard-boiled genre and the police procedural.
    And 1977 to 2013 has been dominated by cozies, romantic suspense and commercial fiction. I know there have been unusual high spots in the 1977-2013 period and I don't think of it as homogenous; my mind can be changed by assertions backed up with evidence.

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    1. My comment above is lacking an important word that I had enclosed in carets, which apparently don't print; "In order to start a fight in your comments section (grin) ..." Your readers are all very civilized, and I was kidding!

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  3. As far as the first use of the term "cozy" goes, opinions vary. Wikipedia gives "late 20th century" and has a footnote which leads to a web page that doesn't use the word "cozy". I did find this interesting page: http://traditionalmysteries.blogspot.ca/2012/01/on-origins-of-term-cozy-mystery.html. It cites Dilys Winn's 1977 volume, Murder Ink, as having used it, but as far as I'm concerned she misapplied the term if the article is correct (I haven't checked). The article cites a dissertation to which I don't have access that used it in 1958 to describe what we think of as cozies.

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    1. Well of course Carr wasn't using the word in a systematic sense, but it's interesting how the phrase "cozy with crime" came to him like that, so many decades ago.

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